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.

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 […]

Holiday

Simon Foreman (CITA, Toronto) – Gravitational lensing of line intensity maps

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

Gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has emerged as a powerful cosmological probe, made possible by the development and characterization of nearly-optimal estimators for extracting the lensing signal from temperature and polarization maps. One can ask whether similar tools can be applied to upcoming "intensity maps" of emission lines at various wavelengths (e.g. […]

Carlos García García (IFF, Madrid) – Theoretical priors for quintessence

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

Dark energy is a key unsolved problem. An enormous number of theories try to explain the accelerated expansion of the universe, ranging from the simplicity of a cosmological constant to the inclusion of new gravitational fields that affect space-time dynamics. We need clever methods to test the landscape of theories to make the most of […]

Kimmy Wu (KICP Chicago) – Delensing, Neural Networks, the H_0 problem — a perspective from the CMB

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

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) contains a wealth of information about the early and the late universe. In this talk, I will focus on the search of primordial gravitational waves. Specifically, I will talk about “delensing” — constraining the lensing component in the CMB B-mode maps that we might reduce the soon-to-be major uncertainty of […]

Holiday

Silvia Scorza (Snolab, Sudbury) – Updates from SNOLAB

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

Astroparticle physics experiments searching for rare events, such as neutrinoless double beta decay and dark matter particles interactions, have to be shielded from background radiation that would interact and hide the physics of interest, and have to exhibit a radioactive background as low as possible. Therefore, underground site are preferred. Being protected from cosmic rays, […]

NO INPA SEMINAR MTG

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

SPECIAL – Brittany Kamai (CalTech) – Looking further back with LIGO

INPA Common Room 50-5026

Gravitational wave detectors require constant innovation in detector technology to meet the growing needs of the astrophysics community. With improved sensitivity, we can move beyond the measurements in the local universe and perform precision tests of cosmology. I will discuss our efforts to reduce the amount of low frequency noise within the LIGO detectors, which has […]

Hillary Child – Nonlinear Structure Formation at Two Scales: from Bispectrum Baryon Acoustic Oscillations to Evolution of Halo Profiles

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

The “cosmic web” of dark matter halos forms via the collapse of post-inflation density fluctuations. While linear perturbation theory describes this process well at large scales and low densities, it fails at small scales and high densities. I explore two facets of nonlinear structure formation that constrain cosmology: at mildly nonlinear scales, measuring the baryon […]

Sinead Griffin (LBL) – Materials considerations for New Dark Matter Detectors

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

New discoveries in quantum information science and in dark matter detection rely on finding more sensitive detectors than those in state-of-the-art experiments. Traditional detector technologies, based on nuclear and electron scattering, have a lower bound on their sensitivity depending on the target's mass and bandgap. We investigate two classes of new low-threshold detector target materials […]

Alexander Fieguth (Stanford) – Recent results of the Xenon-1t dark matter experiment

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

Beyond the Standard Model of particle physics there exists a form of matter, which seems to be dark in all interaction channels but in its gravitational influence. The nature of this major constituent of the universe is still not understood. The assumption that it is made up of particles which can possibly leave a trace […]

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.

CPTea_colorV4.jpg

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