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.

Xavier Prochaska (UCSD) – Deep Learning of Quasar Spectra

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

I will describe our development of a convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn to search for and characterize absorption lines in quasar spectra. Specifically, the algorithm discovers and measures the redshift and Hydrogen column density of damped Lya systems (DLAs). These systems dominate the neutral hydrogen gas of the universe, trace the interstellar medium of […]

Noah Kurinsky (Stanford) – Pushing to Low Mass with SuperCDMS SNOLAB: New Developments in Ultra-Low Threshold Dark Matter Detectors

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

In the last few years, the dark matter field has bifurcated into experiments focused on wimp-scale dark matter with massive liquid noble detectors and experiments focused on so-called ‘hidden sectors’ dark matter, pushing small detectors to much lower energy resolutions. Low-mass dark matter searches, focusing on single eV-scale energy deposits, are sensitive to different backgrounds […]

Katelin Schutz (UCB) – Excluding a thin dark matter disk in the Milky Way with Gaia DR1: Resurrecting the Dinosaurs

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

If a component of the dark matter has dissipative interactions, it could collapse to form a thin dark disk in our Galaxy coincident with the baryonic disk. It has been suggested that dark disks could explain a variety of observed phenomena, including mass extinction events due to periodic comet impacts. Using the first data release […]

Holiday

Yuan Mei (LBL) – TPC without charge multiplication: a CMOS direct readout towards neutrinoless double-beta decay and other applications

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

High-pressure gaseous TPCs provide a unique combination of excellent energy resolution, event tracking for background discrimination, and scalability, which are ideal for neutrinoless double-beta decay searches. We are developing a pixelated charge readout plane filled with an array of CMOS sensors to harness the power of such a TPC. Each CMOS sensor has an exposed […]

Hirotaka Ito – Numerical Simulations of Photospheric Emission from Collapsar Jets

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

We explore the photospheric emission from a relativistic jet breaking out from a massive stellar envelope based on relativistic hydrodynamical simulations and post- process radiation transfer calculations in three dimensions. It is shown that structures developed within the jet during its propagation have a significant imprint on the resulting emission. Particularly, we show that the […]

Bjoern Lehnert (Carleton University) – Dark Matter Search with DEAP-3600 and the Importance of Rare Nuclear Decay Searches

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

The DEAP-3600 experiment is searching for dark matter with a single phase liquid argon (LAr) target, located at SNOLAB. For a background-free exposure of 3000 kg·yr, the projected sensitivity to the spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross section at 100 GeV/c2 WIMP mass is 1e-46 cm2. The construction and filling of DEAP-3600 was completed in 2016 and the […]

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

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

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' […]

Jason Bono (Fermilab) – Muon Anomalies and Their Future Investigations

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

The muon is 200 times heavier than the electron and still lighter than any hadron, which make it’s interactions, at once, potentially sensitive to undiscovered phenomena, and predictable to high precision within the Standard Model. The muon’s ease of production, natural polarization and self analyzing decay, and comparatively long lifetime also allow for extremely high […]

Wing Yan Ma (Imperial College London) – Recent Neutrino Oscillation Results from T2K

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

T2K is a long baseline neutrino experiment situated in Japan. A muon neutrinos and antineutrinos beam is produced and fired 295km across the country and observed using the 50 kTon Super Kamiokande detector. By studying how many of these neutrinos have oscillated into different flavours and whether the oscillations occur differently for antineutrinos we have […]

Special – Danielle Leonard (CMU) – Measuring the scale-dependence of intrinsic alignments using multiple shear estimates

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

The next generation of cosmological surveys promises significant advancements in the field of weak gravitational lensing. As such, it is crucial that relevant systematic effects such as the intrinsic alignment of galaxies are well-understood. I will discuss a new method for measuring the scale-dependence of the intrinsic alignment contamination to the galaxy-galaxy lensing signal, which […]

Samuele Sangiorgio (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) – Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay with nEXO: Experiment Concept, R&D, and Sensitivity

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

The next-generation Enriched Xenon Observatory (nEXO) is a proposed experiment to search for neutrinoless double beta (0νββ) decay whose observation would imply lepton number violation and confirm the existence of elementary Majorana fermions. nEXO searches for 0νββ in 136 Xe with a target half-life sensitivity of approximately 10 28 years using 5×10 3 kg of […]

Dan Wilkins (Stanford) – Seeing to the Event Horizons of Supermassive Black Holes

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

From the reflection and reverberation of X-rays off the innermost regions of AGN accretion discs, a three-dimensional picture is starting to emerge of the extreme environments around supermassive black holes in which intense X-ray emission is produced and jets are launched at close to the speed of light.   Recent advances in the analysis of […]

Andre Walker-Loud (LBNL) – Lattice QCD for Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay

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

In recent years, lattice QCD has matured to the stage where it is now routine for calculations to be performed at or near the physical pion mass, with fully controlled extrapolations to the continuum and infinite volume limits. These calculations are predominantly related to flavor physics and heavy quark physics. The application of lattice QCD […]

Giorgia Pollina – Unveiling cosmic voids in large-scale structure surveys: the impact of tracer bias

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

The large-scale structure of the Universe can only be observed directly via luminous tracers of the underlying matter density field. However, luminous tracers, such as galaxies, do not precisely mirror the clustering statistic of the bulk of the cold dark matter distribution: their correlation function (or power spectrum) is biased and depends on various properties […]

Ana Bonaca (Harvard-CfA) – What are the tidal streams constraining?

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

Cold stellar streams, remnants of tidally disrupted globular clusters, have been employed as exquisite tracers of dark matter in the Milky Way. Because of their different positions in phase space, different ages, and different levels of observational scrutiny, different streams tell us different things about the Galaxy. We employ a Cramer--Rao or Fisher-matrix approach to […]

Krista Lynne Smith (Stanford) – A New Regime of Optical Variability in AGN: Light Curves from Exoplanet Satellites

The optical light curves of AGN provide a unique window into the conditions and behavior within the accretion disk. The development of a specialized pipeline for AGN science with the unparalleled photometry of exoplanet-hunting satellites allows us to explore new optical variability phenomena. Such data provide an opportunity for direct comparison with X-ray light curves, […]

Dr. Leila Haegel (University of the Balearic Islands, Spain) – Testing general relativity with gravitational waves

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

Gravitational waves have been directly detected by the LIGO experiment in 2015. Since then, five black holes and one neutron star binaries merging have been observed during the two observational runs. The measured signals already provided a large amount of physical results, from the mass distribution of stellar-masses black holes to the short gamma-ray burst […]

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