NPAC (Nuclear/Particle/Astro/Cosmo) Forums |
Organized by: Prof. Lu Lu
Events During the Week of January 18th through January 25th, 2015
Monday, January 19th, 2015
- No events scheduled
Tuesday, January 20th, 2015
- Faculty Candidate Seminar
- The LUX and LZ Dark Matter Experiments
- Time: 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
- Place: 4274 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Kevin O'Sullivan, Yale
- Abstract: Evidence from galactic rotation curves, gravitational lensing, the cosmic microwave background, and other cosmological studies point to the existence of exotic non-luminous matter, referred to as dark matter. In spite of the strong indirect evidence for the existence of dark matter, it's composition remains unknown. One of the most promising putative dark matter candidates are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) which would be observable through their scatters off ordinary matter. The Large Underground Xenon Experiment (LUX) searches for WIMPs using a large, two-phase Xenon detector operating at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF). The first science run of LUX consisted of 85.3 live days with 118 kg of fiducial mass. A pro file-likelihood analysis of the data shows consistency with the background-only hypothesis, allowing a 90% confidence limit to be set on the spin-independent WIMP-nucleon elastic scattering with an upper limit on the cross section of 7.6x10^46 cm^2 at a WIMP mass of 33 GeV. LUX is continuing to take data and is working on a low-threshold analysis to search for light WIMPs (< 6 GeV in mass). Concurrently design work is ongoing for the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) project which will be two orders of magnitude more sensitive than LUX.
- Host: Dasu
Wednesday, January 21st, 2015
- Faculty Candidate Seminar
- The non-thermal Universe
- Time: 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
- Place: 4274 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Markus Ahlers, UW - Madison
- Abstract: One of the most puzzling observations of modern astronomy is the existence of very high-energetic messengers in the form of cosmic rays, gamma-rays and cosmic neutrinos. These phenomena are related to non-thermal processes in the Universe which in most cases are barely understood. The multi-messenger observations contain not only information about particle production processes in the sources but also the cosmic evolution of source populations and various propagation effects in extragalactic and Galactic environments. I will highlight how recent observations in cosmic ray, gamma-ray and neutrino astronomy provide new clues or support existing models of the underlying physics of high-energy phenomena in the Universe.
- Host: Dasu
Thursday, January 22nd, 2015
- No events scheduled
Friday, January 23rd, 2015
- No events scheduled