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.

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 […]

Ke-Jung (Ken) Chen (ASIAA) – The First Billion Years of the Universe – Rising Galaxies

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

One of the paramount problems in modern astrophysics is to understand the end of the cosmic dark ages when the first stars, supernovae, black holes, and galaxies transformed the simple early universe into a state of ever-increasing complexity. Modern cosmological simulations suggest that the hierarchical assembly of dark matter halos provided the gravitational wells that […]

Jyoti Joshi (BNL) – Recent Results from MicroBooNE Liquid Argon TPC

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

MicroBooNE is a large (85-ton active mass) liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) experiment operating near the surface at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. The detector observes neutrino interactions from the on-axis Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) at short distance (470 m), enabling an investigation of the MiniBooNE low-energy excess as well as neutrino-argon cross section measurements. […]

Chris Benson (UCB) – Using MiniCLEAN and measurements of microphysical material properties in the vacuum ultraviolet regime to inform next-generation dark matter and neutrino detectors

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

Single phase, zero-field, liquid noble gas scintillator detectors are a simple, scalable and cost-effective approach for dark matter and neutrino detection. MiniCLEAN is a liquid argon dark matter detector located 6,800 feet underground at SNOLAB in Canada. In addition to its role as a detector for dark matter searches, MiniCLEAN also serves as a technology […]

Jyoti Joshi (BNL) – Recent Results from MicroBooNE Liquid Argon TPC

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

MicroBooNE is a large (85-ton active mass) liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) experiment operating near the surface at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. The detector observes neutrino interactions from the on-axis Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) at short distance (470 m), enabling an investigation of the MiniBooNE low-energy excess as well as neutrino-argon cross section measurements. […]

Arka Banerjee (Stanford) – Signatures of massive neutrinos on Large Scale Structure

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

Neutrino oscillation experiments have shown that there are at least two massive neutrino eigenstates, in a mass range that can produce observable signatures in current and future cosmological surveys. I will talk about the challenges and progress in correctly including the effects of massive neutrinos in N-body simulations of structure formation. Finally, I will talk […]

Douglas Finkbeiner (Harvard) – Making neural net classifiers more robust and explainable: Lessons from Adversarial AI

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

As deep neural nets achieve ever greater successes, efforts to break them and learn about their failure modes are also ramping up. Security experts and malicious actors are interested in weaknesses per se, and we scientists are more interested in what we can learn about robustness to inputs somewhat different from training data. I will […]

Andrej Dvornik (UNLV) – KiDS and biases

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

The current ongoing large imaging surveys are an excellent tool for studying the origin and evolution of the Universe and the galaxy - dark matter connection, using the weak gravitational lensing as the main probe. Using the predicting power of the halo model formalism, the weak gravitational lensing (together with other large scale probes) can […]

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