NPAC (Nuclear/Particle/Astro/Cosmo) Forums |
Organized by: Prof. Lu Lu
Events During the Week of May 15th through May 22nd, 2016
Monday, May 16th, 2016
- No events scheduled
Tuesday, May 17th, 2016
- CMB Polarization Measurements: Cutting the trail to CMB-S4
- Time: 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
- Place: 5280 Chamberlin
- Speaker: Darcy Barron, University of California, Berkeley
- Abstract: The CMB community started the planning stages for the "ultimate" ground-based CMB polarization experiment, CMB-S4, in 2013. Since then, the current generation of ground-based experiments has published several detections of B-mode polarization from gravitational lensing, demonstrating the techniques that will be expanded to characterize the signal across the sky. Deep searches for primordial B-mode polarization have shown the challenges in foreground contamination and control of systematics for reaching high sensitivity at large angular scales. The CMB community is currently working on defining the science goals and instrument requirements for CMB-S4. Meanwhile, the next generation of even more powerful CMB polarization experiments will soon begin to produce results. I will give an overview of the current state of the field, and the ongoing planning for CMB-S4.
- Host: Kam Arnold
Wednesday, May 18th, 2016
- HAWC: A New View of the Very High Energy Sky
- Time: 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
- Place: 5280 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Tom Weisgarber
- Abstract: The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory has been fully operational since its inauguration on 20 March 2015. Designed to measure cosmic rays and gamma rays in the very high energy (VHE) range (from 100 GeV to 100 TeV), HAWC observes 2/3 of the entire sky every day. HAWC has a large field of view of ~2 sr and a duty cycle of >95%, making it an ideal instrument to search for both new VHE sources and transient activity in the VHE band. In this talk, I will discuss the results from HAWC's first year of data with the full detector, highlighting several new Galactic sources and demonstrating the capability of HAWC to identify VHE transients. I will also discuss the complementarity between HAWC and other instruments such as IceCube in the context of searching for the sources of the highest energy cosmic rays and neutrinos.
- Host: Stefan Westerhoff
Thursday, May 19th, 2016
- No events scheduled
Friday, May 20th, 2016
- No events scheduled