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.

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 […]

Jia Liu (Princeton) – Nonlinear cosmology with massive neutrinos

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

The non-zero mass of neutrinos suppresses the growth of cosmic structure on small scales. Since the level of suppression depends on the masses of the three active neutrino species, the evolution of large-scale structure is a promising tool to constrain the total mass of neutrinos and possibly shed light on the mass hierarchy. I will […]

Dr. Quentin Riffard (LBL) – Direct detection of Dark Matter: from LUX to LZ

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

Liquid xenon two-phase time projection chamber (TPC) is one of the most promising technologies for WIMP dark matter direct detection. By using this technology, the LUX, XENON1T, and PANDAX-II collaborations established the most stringent limits on WIMP-nucleus cross section above 10 GeV. For WIMP searches, the expected signal is composed of nuclear recoils (NR), while […]

NO INPA SEMINAR MTG

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

NO INPA SEMINAR MTG

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

Aaron Manalaysay (UC Davis) – 178 nm: The magic of liquid xenon and the search for dark matter

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

The introduction of liquid-xenon (LXe) to the field of dark-matter direct detection caused a paradigm shift in this search. Primarily focused on the search for the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle, LXe detectors have improved our sensitivity to these dark-matter candidates by a factor of 10,000 since their introduction roughly ten years ago, compared to the […]

Morgan Askins (UCB) – Search for invisible nucleon decay in the SNO+ detector

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

Many Grand Unified Theories predict processes that would allow baryons to decay to leptons, violating baryon number conservation. The observation of baryon number violation in nucleon decay would be a revelation as well as being pivotal in understanding the apparent asymmetry between baryons and anti-baryons in the universe. This is manifest in some theories primarily […]

Giovanni Benato (UCB, LBL) – Waiting for neutrinoless double beta decay with cryogenic calorimeters

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

Neutrinoless double beta decay is the matter-creating process that is most accessible with the current technology. Its discovery would demonstrate the non-conservation of lepton number and that neutrinos have a Majorana mass component, and indicate a possible solution for the baryon asymmetry of the universe. In this seminar, I will review the current status of […]

SPECIAL – Rajesh Sankaran – (ANL) – Waggle and Array of Things

50-Auditorium

The Waggle Platform is a research project at Argonne National Laboratory to design, develop, and deploy a novel wireless sensor platform with advanced edge computing capabilities to enable a new breed of sensor-driven environmental science and smart city research. The software and hardware designs from the Waggle project are used by the NSF funded Array […]

NO INPA SEMINAR MTG

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

Karl van Bibber (UCB) – A Primer on the Axion

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

This is the first of a two-part series on the axion and the current experimental campaign to find it. This first seminar will focus on the history and motivation of the axion, rooted in the Strong-CP problem, i.e. the absence of the neutron electric dipole moment, some phenomenology, and an overview of experimental avenues to […]

Maria Simanovskaia (UCB) – Searching for Dark Matter Axions with HAYSTAC

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

Continuing on the topic of axion searches from last week, this seminar will highlight one experiment, HAYSTAC, which looks for an axion-induced power excess spectrally coincident with the resonance of a microwave cavity immersed in a strong magnetic field. This is the first such experiment to incorporate a dilution refrigerator and Josephson parametric amplifier and […]

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