Understanding the circumgalactic medium--the gaseous halo surrounding a galaxy, is an integral part to understanding galaxy evolution. The z ~ 2-3 universe is interesting as this is when the star formation rate and AGN activity peak. My work concludes the decade-long Quasars Probing Quasars survey designed for studying massive galaxy formation and quasar feedback. I […]

The line-of-sight power spectrum (P_F(k)) of the Ly-α forest has proven to be a valuable tool for doing cosmological observations. It also not only allows to constrain cosmological parameters, but enables us to measure the thermal state of the IGM at redshifts z>1.8. While at large scales (k<0.02 s/km) P_F(k) has been accurately measured using […]

Deep Learning has revolutionized the fields of computer vision, speech recognition and control systems. Can Deep Learning (DL) work for scientific problems? This talk will explore a variety of DOE/LBL applications that are currently benefiting from Deep Learning. We will review classification and regression problems in astronomy, cosmology, neuroscience, genomics and high-energy physics. We will […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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' […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]