Neutrinos, Quantum Gravity and the Big Questions – New Ideas for New Data

Neutrinos are perfect probes of quantum gravity. The particles’ weak interactions allow to preserve quantum coherence for very long timespans, and neutrino telescopes have started to collect data of neutrinos at extreme energies that have travelled extra-galactic distances. Moreover, the expected breaking of global symmetries such as lepton number in quantum gravity may induce neutrino Majorana masses. The talk discusses how new ideas about quantum gravity could imply exotic properties or phenomena in the neutrino sector, such as altered dispersion relations, quantum-gravitational decoherence, or UV/IR mixing that may be linked to the big open questions of particle physics and cosmology like the nature of dark matter or the electroweak hierarchy problem.