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.
Jessie Muir (Michigan) – Unbiasing cosmology on the largest scales
One of the most exciting areas of research in cosmology is the effort to extract information about fundamental physics from observations of the universe on large scales. With the advent […]
Bradford Welliver (LBNL) – Results and Current Status of the SuperCDMS Soudan Experiment
The SuperCDMS experiment is a dark matter search that utilizes an array of 15 patterned Ge crystals, called iZIPs with a total mass of 9kg. SuperCDMS has completed operations at […]
Pierre Sokolsky (Utah) – Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays: Complex Spectral Structure and Evidence for Anisotropy in the Northern Sky
We present recent results from the Telescope Array (TA) collaboration on the spectrum and anisotropy of cosmic rays from 1015 to 1020 eV. The simple power law spectrum thought to […]
Samuel Flender (ANL) – Cosmology and the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich sky: Observations and simulations
The Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (SZ) effect is an important observational signature of galaxy clusters, the largest objects in the Universe today. In particular, the pairwise kinematic SZ signal probes the matter-velocity correlation […]
Ken Chen (NAOJ) – Lighting up the Universe with Extreme Supernovae
Recent all-sky transient searches have discovered new and unexpected explosion types that fall outside traditional SN classification schemes. These exotic outliers in many cases are due to the deaths of […]
Javier Caravaca Rodriguez (UCB) – Cherenkov and Scintillation light separation with the CHESS experiment
The first step toward construction of a hybrid optical detector like THEIA is the demonstration of separation of scintillation and Cherenkov light in liquid scintillators (LS). This would allow reconstruction […]
Daniel Dwyer (LBNL) – Evidence against sterile neutrinos from the Daya Bay Experiment
50A-5132- Sessler 50A-5132 Sessler Conference Room, CAPrevailing models of antineutrino emission by nuclear reactors do not agree with observations. This discrepancy has been considered possible evidence for neutrino oscillation to non-interacting, or sterile, neutrino states. Although […]
Jessica Lu (UCB) – New Developments in Adaptive Optics: Wide Fields and Precise PSFs
Adaptive optics correct for the blurring effects of the Earth’s atmosphere. However, most AO systems today suffer from limited fields of view and point spread functions that vary over time […]
Jon Ouellet (MIT) – ABRACADABRA: A New Approach to the Search for Axion Dark Matter
The evidence for the existence of Dark Matter is well supported by many cosmological observations. But we have not yet been able to determine how this new type of matter […]
Titouan Lazeyras (MPA) – Dark matter halo bias from separate universe sim-ulations
The large-scale local bias parameters of dark matter halos are essential to describe the statistics of halos and galaxies on large scales, as well as for the halo model of […]
Jose Ezquiaga (UAM) – Testing dark energy and gravity with the speed of gravitational waves
LIGO’s gravitational waves (GWs) detection has inaugurated an era to test the foundations of gravity. This includes also probing the nature of Dark Energy. Theories explaining the present acceleration of […]
Giovanni Benato (LBNL) – Discovery probability of next-generation neutrinoless double-β decay experiments
50A-5132- Sessler 50A-5132 Sessler Conference Room, CANeutrinoless double beta (0νββ) decay is the only process which can feasibly investigate the Majorana nature of neutrinos and total lepton number conservation. A broad international experimental program requiring considerable […]
Samuel Hinton – Bayesian Hierarchical Methods for Supernova Cosmology
In the era of precision cosmology, systematic uncertainty is quickly becoming the limiting factor in modern cosmological analyses. In my work, I discuss a method for performing supernova analyses by […]
Eddie Schlafly (LBNL) – Mapping the Galaxy’s Dust in 3D
50A-5132- Sessler 50A-5132 Sessler Conference Room, CAThe Milky Way's dust is of basic importance in astronomy. It is both crucial to the formation of stars and is a pervasive observational nuisance. Despite the dust's importance, existing […]
Yi-Kuan Chiang (Johns Hopkins) – Which Galactic dust map should I use? Insights from extragalactic tomography
INPA Common Room 50-5026Over the past few years, clustering-based redshift estimation has emerged as a new way to estimate redshifts and perform extragalactic tomography of arbitrary datasets. On a similar timescale, observations by […]
Oliver Just (RIKEN) – Modeling remnants of neutron-star mergers and core-collapse supernovae
50A-5132- Sessler 50A-5132 Sessler Conference Room, CANeutron-star mergers and core-collapse supernovae are promising events to herald a new era of multi-messenger astronomy, as they release substantial amounts of energy in gravitational waves, neutrinos, and electromagnetic emission. […]
Stephen Portillo (Harvard) – Improved Source Detection in Crowded Fields using Probabilistic Cataloging
50A-5132- Sessler 50A-5132 Sessler Conference Room, CACataloging is challenging in crowded fields because sources are extremely covariant with their neighbors and blending makes even the number of sources ambiguous. We present the first optical probabilistic stellar […]
Marie Lau (UC Santa Cruz) – Quasars Probing Quasars: the Circumgalactic Medium Surrounding z ~ 2 Quasars
50A-5132- Sessler 50A-5132 Sessler Conference Room, CAUnderstanding the circumgalactic medium--the gaseous halo surrounding a galaxy, is an integral part to understanding galaxy evolution. The z ~ 2-3 universe is interesting as this is when the star […]
Michael Walther (UCSB) – New Constraints on Thermal Evolution in the IGM from the Small Scale Lyα Forest Power Spectrum
50A-5132- Sessler 50A-5132 Sessler Conference Room, CAThe line-of-sight power spectrum (P_F(k)) of the Ly-α forest has proven to be a valuable tool for doing cosmological observations. It also not only allows to constrain cosmological parameters, but […]
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.
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.