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.

Probing Dark Matter with Radio Surveys

INPA Common Room 50-5026

Julian Munoz Probing Dark Matter with Radio Surveys A significant part of dark matter could be compact, in particular in the form of primordial black holes. I will review the signatures of primordial black holes, both in the form of gravitational-wave events and as gravitational lenses of fast radio bursts. Alternatively, a WIMP-y dark-matter component […]

Initial results from the Majorana Demonstrator – By Alan Poon – LBNL

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

Neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments play a major role in the search for lepton number violation and the Majorana nature of the neutrino mass. The MAJORANA Collaboration has assembled two modules of high-purity Ge detectors to search for neutrinoless double-beta decay in 76-Ge at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota. One of the […]

Marcelo Alvarez -Simulating Large Scale Structure Observables from Reionization to the Present

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

The next generation of large scale structure surveys will map out the universe in unprecedented detail. Transformative techniques in computational astrophysics are emerging as the optimal ways to extract information from these surveys, with realistic and routine full sky simulations finally within reach. I will describe a new pipeline for efficiently simulating high resolution maps […]

Scott Daniel (University of Washington) – Deterministic \chi^2 Exploration to Find Credible Limits Faster than by Bayesian Sampling

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

Once data has been collected, it is desirable to be able to quickly transform that data into statements about the values and corresponding uncertainties -- the "confidence limits" or "credible limits" -- of the physical parameters underlying the data.  Traditionally, this problem is treated probabilistically. This process can be time consuming, as enough samples need […]

Raul Hennings Yeomans (UCB)

Recent progress on the next generation double beta decay experiment with low-temperature macro-calorimeters (CUPID) The Cuore Upgrade with Particle IDentification, or CUPID, is a proposed next generation double-beta decay experiment that requires a low-threshold optical photon light detector. The use of a secondary bolometer as a light detector is being investigated since, $\alpha$-particles (the main […]

Lauren Ice (ASU) – Measurement of the Two-Photon Exchange Contribution to Elastic Lepton-Proton Scattering with the OLYMPUS Experiment

50B-4205

The OLYMPUS experiment measured the two-photon exchange contribution to elastic electron-proton scattering, which is thought to be the most likely candidate to resolve the discrepancy observed between polarized and unpolarized measurements of the proton electric-to-magnetic form factor ratio. To deterimine the two-photon exchange contribtuion, OLYMPUS measured the positron-proton to electron-proton elastic scattering cross section ratio […]

Martina Gerbino (NORDITA) – Three Neutrinos in Cosmology (to Say Nothing of Laboratory)

Neutrinos are the only standard model particles of unknown mass. Thus, measuring their mass is one of the leading goals in fundamental physics. Cosmology currently provides the tightest bounds on the sum of the neutrino masses and the possibility that next generation experiments can provide a detection looks promising. Then, further questions would have to […]

Sandra Miarecki – Earth vs. Neutrinos: first measurements of neutrino absorption in the Earth and the muon neutrino-to-nucleon cross section above 1 TeV with the IceCube Detector

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

Bio: Sandy Miarecki is a retired Air Force test pilot, PhD graduate of the University of California-Berkeley, and an affiliate member of LBL after completing her dissertation research at LBL.  She is currently an assistant professor of physics at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. The IceCube Detector at the South Pole was […]

Quentin Riffard – Direct detection of dark matter with the DarkSide program

A large number of astrophysical and cosmological observations at different scales supports the existence of a cold dark matter component in the Universe. At the Universe scale, this component is uniformly distributed and represents roughly 26% of the total mass-energy density of the Universe. The Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP), a generic particle, is one […]

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 of increasingly large cosmological datasets (and correspondingly small statistical uncertainties), future progress in the field will fundamentally be determined by our ability to understand and […]

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 the Soudan Underground Laboratory and reported results on low-mass (M 10 GeV/c^2) WIMP search analysis with 1700 kg-days of exposure using 10 of the iZIP […]

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 function, scaled by the average optical depth of galaxy clusters, and is thus an interesting probe both from a cosmological and astrophysical point of view. […]

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 massive stars and therefore may have been prevalent in the primordial universe because the Pop III IMF is thought to be top-heavy. Depending on the […]

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 of particle directionality in a low energy threshold detector, and provide improved particle identification. The CHESS experiment successfully images Cherenkov rings on LS such as […]

Daniel Dwyer (LBNL) – Evidence against sterile neutrinos from the Daya Bay Experiment

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

Prevailing 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 the existence of sterile neutrinos would have profound implications, a variety of measurements by the Daya Bay Experiment disfavor sterile models. I will summarize these […]

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 and position. I will present results from several experiments to overcome these limitations. We have deployed a ground-layer adaptive optics experiment on the UH 2.2 […]

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 fits into our understanding of the Universe on the smallest scales. Separately, long standing problems within the Standard Model point to new weakly interacting particles […]

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.

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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