Institute for Nuclear and Particle Astrophysics (INPA) at LBNL

The INPA Seminar weekly talks are on Fridays, starting at 12:00 pm, unless informed otherwise. The seminar talk starts with a brief presentation of the weekly scientific news. Typically, the talks conclude by 1:00 pm. The seminars are held in the Sessler Conference Room,  located in Bldg. 50A- 5132.

The committee members are:

The seminar schedule for the Institute for Nuclear and Particle Astrophysics (INPA) is tentative and becomes final a few days before the Friday talk.

Please send all suggestions for future INPA talks and speakers to the INPA Committee.

To be added to the INPA News Mailing List, please contact Erica Hall.

« All Events

  • This event has passed.

Elizabeth Wills (Drexel) – Probing Cosmic Ray Anisotropy in the Northern Hemisphere with Atmospheric Neutrinos

January 26, 2018 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Cosmic Rays have remained an enigma for over a hundred years since their discovery. This talk focuses on a well-measured, yet similarly elusive feature; an unexplained structure in arrival direction spanning many energies and angular scales. This talk introduces a new way of exploring Cosmic Ray Anisotropy: observation through secondary neutrinos. Studying the cosmic rays’ neutral daughter particles with pointing capabilities, like neutrinos, could shed new light. This can be done at two levels; a source which produces cosmic rays must also produce high energy astrophysical neutrinos, and low energy atmospheric neutrinos are made when the cosmic rays interact with the atmosphere. This analysis focuses on atmospheric neutrinos detected by IceCube, a Cherenkov detector instrumenting a kilometer cubed of glacial ice at the South Pole. IceCube has studied the anisotropy and its energy dependence in the Southern sky using atmospheric muons.
Using IceCube and a high-acceptance dataset of atmospheric neutrinos created for this analysis, we are nearing the sensitivity threshold to observe the phenomenon in atmospheric neutrinos arriving from the Northern Hemisphere. This analysis focuses on energy ranges that correspond to the spatially-consistent lower energy features of the dipole structure. Due to the statistical limitations of the neutrino dataset in comparison to the cosmic ray datasets, we also introduce new methods for detecting signal along with the standard multipole analysis methods. These include a 1D relative intensity fit to determine the amplitude and phase of the dipole, and a 2D binned log-likelihood analysis focusing on searching for observed anisotropy maps from the Tibet collaboration. Future hope for the work is to create a single-detector all-sky map of the anisotropy, minimizing systematical difficulties combining datasets from separate collaborations.

Details

Date:
January 26, 2018
Time:
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Venue

50A-5132- Sessler
50A-5132 Sessler Conference Room CA

INPA guests from campus can now come to the lab early on Fridays. The INPA Common Room (50-5026) is reserved for our guests from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon and from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Note that the seminars are now held in 50A-5132 to accommodate a more significant number of attendees.

CPTea Series (also known as INPA Tea Series)

The Physics Division CPTea Series invites you to an In-Person Tea Series 1st Friday of every month at 3:30 pm INPA Conference Room 50-5026.

Everyone is welcome to attend the open forum. Tea and light refreshments will be served.

CPTea_colorV4.jpg

INPA Common Room (50-5026)
Fridays
3:30 pm

Access to the Lab

For a shuttle pass, please email Erica Hall. The pass is only valid for the day of the seminar.

Erica Hall