INPA

INPA Seminar Speaker: Aditi Pradeep (SLAC)- Title: superCDMS
2026-04-03 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Date: April 3, 2026
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Location: Sessler Conference Room – 50A-5132 [Hybrid and In-Person]
Speaker: Aditi Pradeep (SLAC)
Title: Searching in the dark: the low-mass frontier of direct dark matter detection
Abstract: Despite overwhelming astrophysical and cosmological evidence for dark matter, its particle nature remains one of the most compelling open questions in physics. While WIMPs with masses of 100’s GeV or larger have long been the target of direct detection experiments, theoretical and experimental developments increasingly motivate a broader search encompassing sub-GeV and even sub-MeV candidates. In this talk, I will survey the current dark matter landscape, motivating the case for low-mass dark matter searches. I will present the current status and latest results from the SuperCDMS experiment, which uses cryogenic silicon and germanium detectors with Transition Edge Sensor (TES) readout to probe dark matter masses below 10 GeV/c², and place its sensitivity in the context of other direct detection experiments. A central challenge facing most next-generation low-mass searches is the Low Energy Excess (LEE) – an anomalous signal-like background below a few hundred eV observed across multiple experiments and not yet attributed to a known source. I will discuss current efforts to diagnose and mitigate this background with position-based event tagging using a steerable, cryogenic MEMS-based optical calibration source. Finally, I will outline the path toward next-generation experiments, emphasizing advances in target materials and quantum sensing technologies, highlighting the need for advanced readout and characterization techniques to meet evolving experimental demands.
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https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 950 1669 6011
Passcode: [REDACTED]

NO INPA Seminar Speaker
2026-04-10 12:00 - 13:00

NO INPA Seminar
2026-04-17 12:00 - 13:00, 2026-04-24 12:00 - 13:00, 2026-05-15 12:00 - 13:00, 2026-06-05 12:00 - 13:00, 2026-06-19 12:00 - 13:00

INPA Seminar Speaker: Yashwanth Bezawada(LBL)- Title: Testing Hybrid Optical Neutrino Detector Technologies at Eos
2026-05-01 12:00 - 13:00
Date: May 1, 2026
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Location: Sessler Conference Room – 50A-5132 [Hybrid and In-Person]
Speaker: Yashwanth Bezawada (LBL)
Title: Testing Hybrid Optical Neutrino Detector Technologies at Eos
Abstract: Future kilotonne-scale, scintillation-based neutrino detectors, such as Theia, plan to exploit new and yet-to-be-developed technologies to simultaneously measure Cherenkov and scintillation signals to provide a rich and broad physics program. These hybrid detectors will be based on fast timing photodetectors, novel liquid scintillators, and spectral sorting. This talk focuses on a currently operating technical demonstrator, called Eos. The novel detector with an approximately 4-tonne fiducial target volume has been constructed at UC Berkeley and LBNL (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). Eos now provides a test bed for the emerging technologies required for hybrid Cherenkov/Scintillation detectors. Eos is now the first multi-ton scale deployment of the higher light-yield version of water-based liquid scintillator (WbLS). This talk presents the construction and deployment of Eos at Berkeley, water phase performance, deployment of WbLS in Eos, and preliminary results from this data.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 950 1669 6011
Passcode: [REDACTED]

INPA Seminar Speaker: Lorenzo Magrini (Stanford)-Title: A search for short-range new interactions with Mössbauer spectroscopy
2026-05-08 12:00 - 13:00
Date: May 8, 2026
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Location: Sessler Conference Room – 50A-5132 [Hybrid and In-Person]
Speaker: Lorenzo Magrini (Stanford)
Title: A search for short-range new interactions with Mössbauer spectroscopy
Abstract: New light particles, predicted by many proposed extensions of the Standard Model, would manifest as short-range forces between matter. At the nanoscale, electromagnetism is overwhelming, masking anything weaker. Nuclei, on the other hand, sit shielded inside their electron cloud — making them an exceptionally clean place to look. The recoilless 14.4 keV transition in ⁵⁷Fe gives access to this channel with a natural linewidth of ~5 × 10⁻⁹ eV!
I will present an ongoing experiment at Stanford that uses this resonance to probe new interactions between nuclei in the 20–400 nm range. A ⁵⁷Co source illuminates a thin ⁵⁷Fe absorber, while a gold source mass in close proximity would shift the resonance line through the new interaction. I will discuss the design, the systematics that set the ultimate reach, and what we hope to see.
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https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 950 1669 6011
Passcode: [REDACTED]

INPA Seminar Speaker: Jakob Robnik (UC Berkeley)-Title: Feasible MCMC in high-dimensional parameter spaces
2026-05-22 12:00 - 13:00
Date: May 22, 2026
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Location: Sessler Conference Room – 50A-5132 [Hybrid and In-Person]
Speaker: Jakob Robnik (UC Berkeley)
Title: Feasible MCMC in high-dimensional parameter spaces
Abstract: Statistical inference increasingly takes place in high-dimensional parameter spaces (thousands to billions of parameters) and is commonly the computational bottleneck of scientific workflows. To make this task scalable, we have developed Microcanonical Langevin Monte Carlo (MCLMC), the first out-of-the-box MCMC algorithm without Metropolis adjustment. Avoiding the adjustment yields superior scaling with the problem’s dimensionality, while still maintaining error guarantees. MCLMC outperforms current state-of-the-art samplers, such as the No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS), across all the problems we considered. For example, for cosmological field-level inference from galaxy surveys with 2 million parameters, MCLMC inference takes 4 hours while NUTS needs more than 3 days for the same accuracy and computational resources. The gains continue to grow as the dimensionality increases. This kind of improvement can lead to scientific breakthroughs, for example, by enabling optimal information extraction or by enabling the study of solid-state systems of unprecedented size. In the talk, I will give intuition for how scalable MCMC must be in high dimensions, and then introduce MCLMC. I will show practical applications to benchmarks, lattice field theories, cosmological field-level inference, and Bayesian neural networks.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 950 1669 6011
Passcode: [REDACTED]

INPA Seminar Speaker: TBD
2026-05-29 12:00 - 13:00
Date: May 29, 2026
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Location: Sessler Conference Room – 50A-5132 [Hybrid and In-Person]
Speaker: TBD
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Join Zoom Meeting
https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 950 1669 6011
Passcode: [REDACTED]

NO INPA Seminar Speaker
2026-06-12 12:00 - 13:00
Date: June 12, 2026
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Location: Sessler Conference Room – 50A-5132 [Hybrid and In-Person]
Speaker: TBD
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Join Zoom Meeting
https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 950 1669 6011
Passcode: [REDACTED]

INPA Seminar Speaker: TBD
2026-06-26 12:00 - 13:00
Date: June 26, 2026
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Location: Sessler Conference Room – 50A-5132 [Hybrid and In-Person]
Speaker: TBD
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Join Zoom Meeting
https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 950 1669 6011
Passcode: [REDACTED]

NO INPA SEMINAR
2026-07-03 12:00 - 13:00
Date: July 3, 2026
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Location: Sessler Conference Room – 50A-5132 [Hybrid and In-Person]
Speaker: TBD
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Join Zoom Meeting
https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 950 1669 6011
Passcode: [REDACTED]

INPA Seminar Speaker: Prof. Pranava Teja Surukuchi(Pitt)-Title: TBD
2026-07-10 12:00 - 13:00
Date: July 10, 2026
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Location: Sessler Conference Room – 50A-5132 [Hybrid and In-Person]
Speaker: Prof. Pranava Teja Surukuchi
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Join Zoom Meeting
https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 950 1669 6011
Passcode: [REDACTED]

INPA SEMINAR SPEAKER: TBD
2026-07-17 12:00 - 13:00
Date: July 17, 2026
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Location: Sessler Conference Room – 50A-5132 [Hybrid and In-Person]
Speaker: TBD
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Join Zoom Meeting
https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 950 1669 6011
Passcode: [REDACTED]

INAP SEMINAR SPEAKER: TBD
2026-07-24 12:00 - 13:00
Date: July 24, 2026
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Location: Sessler Conference Room – 50A-5132 [Hybrid and In-Person]
Speaker: TBD
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Join Zoom Meeting
https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 950 1669 6011
Passcode: [REDACTED]

INPA SEMINAR SPEAKER: TBD
2026-07-31 12:00 - 13:00
Date: July 31, 2026
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Location: Sessler Conference Room – 50A-5132 [Hybrid and In-Person]
Speaker: TBD
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Join Zoom Meeting
https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 950 1669 6011
Passcode: [REDACTED]

INPA SEMINAR SPEAKER: Dacheng Xu(Columbia University)- Title: Measurement of the Solar Boron-8 Neutrino Fog with XENONnT
2026-08-07 12:00 - 13:00
Date: August 7, 2026
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Location: Sessler Conference Room – 50A-5132 [Hybrid and In-Person]
Speaker: Dacheng Xu (Columbia University)
Title: Measurement of the Solar Boron-8 Neutrino Fog with XENONnT
Abstract: Coherent elastic neutrino–nucleus scattering (CEvNS) of solar neutrinos is a fundamental Standard Model process and an irreducible background for next-generation dark matter searches, often referred to as the “neutrino fog.” With its large exposure and ultra-low background, XENONnT has reached the sensitivity required to observe this interaction. Using data from the first three science runs, we have searched for Boron-8 solar neutrino CEvNS and rejected the background-only hypothesis at 3.3 sigma. In this talk, I will present a detailed view of the search for solar Boron-8 CEvNS using the full analyzed dataset and discuss its implications for beyond-Standard-Model neutrino physics and light dark matter in neutrino fog.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 950 1669 6011
Passcode: [REDACTED]
