Kiley Kennedy
Innovating Triggers and Triggering Innovation: Illuminating New Physics at the Energy Frontier
Abstract:
Although no new fundamental particles have been observed since the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, many compelling theories beyond the Standard Model (BSM) predict new physics at the electroweak or TeV scales accessible to the LHC. The absence of significant excesses underscores the imperative to expand sensitivity to uncovered and unexplored regions of phase space. This talk will focus on leveraging novel trigger techniques and creative reconstruction methods — both present and future — to maximize the discovery potential of long-lived particles and other anomalous BSM physics signatures at the CMS experiment. These efforts will be examined in the context of the LHC, the High-Luminosity LHC, and long-term planning for the future of collider-driven science.
Holly Szumila-Vance
Nucleons: Crossing the Bridge from Quarks to Nuclei
Abstract:
Physicists seek to answer the fundamental question: How is the nucleus of an atom held together to build the matter we see? In the lower energy picture, we describe the nucleus in terms of its protons and neutrons and their exchange of mesons. In the higher energy picture, composite protons and neutrons (composed of quarks and gluons) interact through quantum chromodynamics (QCD). This residual interaction is the strong nuclear force. Through QCD we can describe the proton as a superposition of quark-gluon states that can include states of different sizes. This description naturally implies that bound protons can be different from free protons and allows for color transparency phenomena (whereby the constituent quarks are in a smaller-sized configuration). Using the high intensity electron beam at Jefferson Lab, we study the connection between these descriptions in order to understand how the strong force binds the nucleus together. This talk will discuss insights and future directions using nuclei as a laboratory to search for evidence of small size configurations and their contributions to our fundamental understanding of nucleons.
hosted by:Janet Conrad
Teppei Katori
Hyper-Kamiokande project
Abstract:
Hyper-Kamiokande project consists with 3 components; Hyper-Kamiokande detector, J-APRC neutrino beam upgrade, and the near detector system. Hyper-Kamiokande detector is the 3rd generation of extremely successful water Cherenkov neutrino detectors at the Kamioka Observatory, Japan (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2002 and 2015). It is a 261 kton water tank with roughly 8 times the fiducial volume of Super-Kamiokande which will help us to push all science to an unprecedented level, including beam-based neutrino physics, astrophysics, and beyond-the-Standard-Model discovery science. In this talk, I will mainly discuss the status of the Hyper-Kamiokande detector construction and R&D.
hosted by:Eluned A Smith
Jun Ye
Laser-based Mössbauer spectroscopy for nuclear clock
Abstract:
Lasers and quantum science have fueled revolutionary developments in atomic, molecular, and fundamental physics. Scaling up quantum systems to ever increasing sizes promises to open new discovery opportunities. Quantum technology has brought tens of thousands of atoms to minute-long coherence times for atomic clocks, and it is now also knocking on the door of nuclear physics. The combination of ultrafast optics and precision metrology has built us new tools such as a vacuum ultraviolet frequency comb, enabling the recent breakthrough of quantum-state-resolved laser spectroscopy of thorium-229 nuclear transition. This unification of precision metrology and nuclear physics sparks new ideas for testing fundamental physics and promises nuclear-based clock with billions of nuclear absorbers.
hosted by:Kyle Lee
Dam Son
Relativistic guiding-center motion: a Lorentz-covariant description
Abstract:
When a charged particle moves through a magnetic field, it undergoes fast cyclotron motion along with a slower movement of the guiding center. The guiding center primarily follows the magnetic field lines but gradually drifts away from them. Finding a manifestly Lorentz-covariant description of this motion is an important problem in plasma physics and astrophysics. Although equations of motion derived in the 1960s are implicitly Lorentz invariant, they were written in a cumbersome component form, hindering straightforward extension to curved space. We present a Lorentz invariant action for the guiding center. We further generalize this framework to curved spacetime, demonstrating that the "curvature drift" and "gravitational drift" are connected by Einstein's principle of equivalence.
hosted by:Phil Harris
Jennet Dickinson
On-detector data reduction with smartpixels
Abstract:
In collider physics experiments, highly granular silicon pixel detectors allow for precise measurements of charged particle tracks and vertices. However, the large number of channels in these detectors generate large volumes of data, which will further increase in future experiments with smaller pixel pitches and more complex collision environments. At the LHC, the pixel detectors produce too much data to read out at the proton bunch crossing frequency of 40 MHz, which prevents tracking information from being considered in the first level of hardware-based event selection (L1 trigger). This talk will present a promising co-design strategy for on-chip data reduction that has the potential to provide tracking information to the L1 trigger for the first time. A locally customized neural network embedded in the pixelated region of the detector can extract physics information from the shape of charge clusters with high efficiency and low latency. The design of the first prototype “smartpixels” chip using this strategy will be presented.
hosted by:Eluned Smith
Zhili Weng
Latest Results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station
Abstract:
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) is an MIT-LNS-led precision particle physics detector operating on the International Space Station. Since 2011, AMS has collected more than 240 billion charged cosmic rays, from elementary particles to iron nuclei with energies up to multi-TeV. The high-precision measurements with ~1% accuracy have led to many surprising observations. The latest results on cosmic elementary particles (electrons, positrons, antiprotons, and protons) reveal unique properties and indicate new sources of particles and antiparticles. The data on nuclei and isotopes exhibit characteristic energy dependences that are not explained by current theories. Operating through 2030, with its detector upgrade, AMS will continue to deliver unique and comprehensive data, laying the foundation for a new model of the cosmos.
hosted by:Misha Ivanov
Enrico Pajer
The Ins and Outs of Cosmological Correlators
Abstract:
By directly probing the initial conditions of our universe, cosmological surveys offer us a unique observational handle on quantum field theory in curved spacetime with dynamical gravity and might even allow us to glean information about a full theory of quantum gravity. Here I will report on recent progress in the study of the natural observables in the problem, namely cosmological correlators. To set the stage, I will review the four things that every physicist should know about cosmology. Then, I will review results from two different approaches. First, I will provide an executive summary of general properties that follow from symmetries, unitarity, causality and locality. I will describe how these properties can be leveraged to predict signals that might be hiding in cosmological surveys. Second I will present a new "in-out" formalism to compute cosmological correlators as an interesting alternative to the well-known in-in formalism and I will stress some of its advantages, such as the derivation of recursion relations, correlators cutting rules and a proposal for a de Sitter scattering matrix.
hosted by:Kyle lee
John Lajoie
The Electron Ion Collider: A Unique New Microscope for Matter
Abstract:
The visible world around us is made up of atoms, with protons and neutrons forming the nuclei at their core. Together, protons and neutrons make up most of the mass of everything we see in the universe today, from massive galaxies to individual people. Protons and neutrons themselves are complicated many-body quantum states whose properties are determined by the quarks and gluons that they are comprised of. The quest to understand in detail the structure of protons, neutrons, and nuclei is nothing less that an attempt to answer the questions "What are we made of? What is matter?" The Electron Ion Collider (EIC), to be built by JLab and BNL, will be a unique new machine to collide polarized electrons off polarized protons and light nuclei, providing the capability to study multi-dimensional tomographic images of hadronic matter, and collective effects of gluons in nuclei. In this colloquium I will motivate the physics program at the EIC and the unique new machine and detectors that will be required to answer these fundamental questions.
Hosted by:Phil Harris
Asher Berlin
Searching for the Dark Universe with Superconductors
Abstract:
Recent years have seen a growing interest in applying developing technologies to enable new ways to look for types of dark matter and other new physics that are traditionally difficult to detect due to their extremely feeble interactions with normal matter. While it is commonplace for major technological advancements to have a strong impact on fundamental science, it is also true that a single technology can have many applications. In particular, I will discuss recent ideas leveraging superconducting cavities, which have emerged as the most efficient engineered oscillators, to explore many theories of new physics across a large range of energy scales, such as axions, dark photons, millicharged particles, and gravitational waves.
hosted by:Phil Harris
Matthew Low
Quantum Information at High-Energy Colliders
Abstract:
Some of the most astonishing and counterintuitive features of quantum mechanics—such as entanglement and Bell nonlocality—have traditionally been studied in low-energy, highly controlled laboratory settings. Only recently has it become feasible to explore these phenomena in the high-energy regime accessed by particle colliders. These colliders offer a unique environment in which quantum information theory can be explored, with energies exceeding those of typical lab setups by approximately 12 orders of magnitude. In this talk, I will describe the methods used to measure quantum information observables in collider environments and outline the key challenges and future directions in this emerging field.
hosted by:Phil Harris
Babette Döbrich
Recent results from new physics searches with the NA62 experiment at CERN
Abstract:
The NA62 experiment at CERN, designed to measure the highly-suppressed
decay K+→π+νν, has recently released a new measurement of its branching ratio.
NA62 has also the capability to collect data in a beam-dump mode, where
400~GeV protons are dumped on an absorber. In this configuration, New
Physics particles, including dark photons, dark scalars and axion-like
particles, may be produced and reach a decay volume beginning 80~m
downstream of the absorber.
This talk will give an overview of selected recent NA62 results with a
focus on searches for new physics particles decaying in flight to a
variety of final states.
hosted by:
Ken Van Tilburg
Information Coming Soon!
Abstract:
