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.

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 […]

Vincent Fischer (UC Davis) – Accelerator Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment (ANNIE)

The next generation of large scale neutrino detectors, such as DUNE or Hyper-Kamiokande, will heavily rely on a precise understanding of neutrino-nucleus interactions to reach their goal of measuring leptonic CP violation. Accounting for and reconstructing all final state particles, especially neutrons, created upon such interactions is thus crucial. This is the goal of the […]

Helion Mas du Bourboux ( University of Utah) – Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations in SDSS and DESI using the intergalactic medium absorption

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

We present the measurement of the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) scale from the correlation between absorption in the intergalactic medium and the positions of galaxies and quasars in the SDSS data and in the desi simulations. We use the absorption by neutral Hydrogen and by Magnesium-II observed in quasar spectra to trace the underlying matter […]

Heidi Newberg (RPI) – Dwarf galaxies and dark matter in the Milky Way

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

In the past fifteen years, dozens of tidal streams of stars pulled from dwarf galaxies and globular clusters have been discovered in the Milky Way's stellar halo. Recently, it has been discovered that as the dwarf galaxies fall into our galaxy they perturb the stars in the disk, causing wavelike disturbances that are seen in […]

Rebecca Canning (Stanford) – Understanding Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) in the most massive cosmic laboratories

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

Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs) lurk in the centers of all massive galaxies, a fraction of these SMBHs are actively accreting and this can result in powerful outbursts which have important consequences for galaxy formation and evolution. However, the conditions under which a SMBH becomes active and the manner in which it interacts with its environment […]

Dan Dwyer (LBNL) – Demonstration of a true 3D micro-power sensor for liquid argon time projection chambers

Time projection chambers (TPCs) based on the ionization of cryogenic liquids are a prominent tool for neutrino oscillation, neutrinoless double beta decay, and dark matter experiments. Over the past two years I have pursued the development of a novel charge readout sensor providing true 3D imaging of particle interactions in large-scale liquid argon TPCs. The […]

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