Events at Physics |
Events on Tuesday, February 4th, 2014
- Chaos & Complex Systems Seminar
- Predicting fate
- Time: 12:05 pm
- Place: 4274 Chamberlin Hall (refreshments will be served)
- Speaker: Jim Blair, Milton and Edgewood College
- Abstract: Large quantities of agrochemicals are applied to farm fields every year. What happens to them? How are they transported and transformed? How long do they last in the soil? How rapidly do they move through soil to reach the ground water? Where do they end up? This has been studied after the chemicals have been applied. In this talk I will describe the development of a series of laboratory procedures that attempt to predict the environmental fate of new agrochemicals before they are applied. Topics include: Radio-labels and Liquid Scintillation Counting The Three Faces of Fate Material Balance Does History Matter? MCPA, Dow, and St. Croix Factory Farms and Frankenfoods
- Host: Clint Sprott
- Special Plasma Physics Seminar
- Spectral Line Profile Modeling Under the Action of Dynamic Electric and Static Magnetic Fields
- Time: 12:05 pm
- Place: 5280 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Elijah Martin, North Carolina State University
- Faculty Candidate Seminar
- Searching for dark matter with bubble chambers
- Time: 4:00 pm
- Place: Chamberlin Hall 4274
- Speaker: Hugh Lippincott
- Abstract: The PICO Collaboration (formed from the recent merger of the Chicago-based COUPP and the Canadian-based PICASSO experiments) uses bubble chambers to search for dark matter particles. Unlike the bubble chambers of the 1960s and 1970s, PICO chambers are operated in only mildly superheated conditions, rendering them insensitive to the minimum ionizing particles that typically constitute the largest background in dark matter searches. The bubble chamber allows for rejection of other backgrounds as well - for example, alpha decays can be discriminated from signal events because they sound louder. The result is a detector with minimal backgrounds that can be scaled to large masses. I will introduce the field of direct detection of dark matter and discuss the status of PICO, including results from the COUPP-4 detector and a progress report on COUPP-60 and PICO-2L, two chambers recently commissioned in the deep underground site of SNOLAB.
- Host: Dasu and Everett