Graduate Program Events |
Events on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025
- Measurement of the ZZ production cross-section and EFT constraints
- Time: 9:00 am - 11:00 am
- Place: Chamberlin Hall Room 5310
- Speaker: Justin Marquez
- Abstract: This research studies the production of Z boson pairs in proton-proton collisions with the CMS detector at the CERN LHC. The cross-section of this production is measured by observing four-lepton final states using early Run 3 data (2022-2023) witih center-of-mass energy of 13.6 TeV, considering only electrons and muons in the final state. In addition to the cross-section measurement, various relevant parameters in the standard model effective field theory will be investigated to obtain statistical limits on their effects on ZZ production.
- Host: Matthew F. Herndon
- Probing primordial non-gaussianity with large-scale velocity reconstruction using ACT and DESI-LS data
- Time: 11:00 am - 1:00 pm
- Place: Chamberlin Hall Room 5310
- Speaker: Anderson Lai
- Abstract: The large-scale velocity field of matter is a sensitive probe in several exciting areas of cosmology and astrophysics, including cosmological parameters, dark matter halo models, and electron profiles. In addition, by combining it with the large-scale velocity and galaxy overdensity fields, one can obtain competitive constraints on local primordial non-Gaussianity. In this talk, I will introduce kinematic Sunyaev–Zeldovich (kSZ) tomography, a modern technique for reconstructing the large-scale velocity field, followed by a novel development in an optimal power-spectrum estimator that outperforms conventional approaches with highly compressed computation time. I will present its latest application to observations from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and DESI-LS (Legacy Survey), yielding a ~12σ detection of the kSZ signal—an improvement factor of ~3 compared to earlier studies. With upcoming data from the Simons Observatory and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, there is a promising outlook for kSZ velocity reconstruction.
- Host: Moritz Muenchmeyer