INPA

NO INPA SEMINAR
2023-06-23 12:00 - 13:00, 2023-05-26 12:00 - 13:00, 2023-05-19 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles)

Speaker: Ben Smithers (UTA)- Title: A Multi-Channel Search for Signatures of eV-Scale Sterile Neutrinos in IceCube
2023-06-16 12:00 - 13:00
This is an In-Person [HYBRID] Event
LOCATION: Sessler CR, 50A-5132
DATE: June 16, 2023
TIME: 12:00- 1:00 PM
TITLE: A Multi-Channel Search for Signatures of eV-Scale Sterile Neutrinos in IceCube
ABSTRACT: The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic-kilometer-scale neutrino observatory built using a gigaton of instrumented ice near the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica; it measures the Cherenkov light emitted by the daughter particles of neutrino-nucleon interactions occurring inside and around the detector from neutrinos of both astrophysical and atmospheric origin. For eV2-scale sterile neutrino models, matter-effects can yield resonant $bar{
u}_{mu}tobar{
u}_{s}$ oscillations for TeV-scale up-going neutrinos. For certain combinations of mixing angles, this is also expected to yield resonant $bar{
u}_{mu}tobar{
u}_{tau}$ oscillations at the same energies and zeniths as the $
u_{mu}$ disappearance. This superimposed $
u_{mu}$ disappearance and $
u_{tau}$ appearance presents itself as an ideal signature with which we can search for indications of sterile neutrino oscillations. Here, we discuss a multi-channel analysis searching for signs of both resonant muon neutrino disappearance as well as tau neutrino appearance.
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Speaker: Brendan Crill (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology) Title: SPHEREx: NASA's all-sky near-infrared spectral survey
2023-06-09 12:00 - 13:00
This is an In-Person [HYBRID] Event
LOCATION: INPA Common Room – 50- 5026
DATE: June 9, 2023
TIME: 12:00- 1:00 PM
TITLE: SPHEREx: NASA’s all-sky near-infrared spectral survey
ABSTRACT: SPHEREx is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission to produce a near-infrared all-sky spectrophotometric survey. The 2-year mission will measure spectra of every 6-arcsecond pixel on the sky between 0.75 and 5 microns at spectral resolution varying between R=35 and 130. SPHEREx’s instrument is based on a 30-cm off-axis telescope feeding six Teledyne H2RG detectors behind linear variable filters. The mission is optimized to address three science themes: 1. Inflation in the early Universe through large scale structure, 2. the history of galaxy formation by measuring spectra of the extragalactic background fluctuations, and 3. the inventory of biogenic ices in our own Galaxy by surveying ice spectral absorption features towards stars. This talk will describe the unique instrument and survey, and address prospects for constraints on inflationary cosmology through a 3D galaxy redshift survey with the SPHEREx data.
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[SPECIAL] Speaker: Roohi Dalal (Princeton University)- Title: Cosmology and Systematics from Hyper Suprime-Cam Year 3 Data
2023-06-02 12:00 - 13:00
This is an In-Person [HYBRID] Event
LOCATION: Sessler Conference Room 50A-5132
DATE: June 2, 2023
TIME: 12:00- 1:00 PM
TITLE: Cosmology and Systematics from Hyper Suprime-Cam Year 3 Data
ABSTRACT: The Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) survey is the deepest Stage III weak lensing experiment, going to ~26 mag with exquisite seeing. The depth and image quality achieved by HSC allow us to probe cosmology using weak lensing upto high redshifts, and these analyses serve as important preparatory studies for the next generation of weak lensing surveys. I will discuss our constraints on cosmological parameters using weak lensing cosmic shear power spectra measured from the Year 3 shear catalog of HSC, covering 416 square degrees of the northern sky. After giving a brief overview of our cosmological analysis, and our new constraint on the S8 parameter, I will focus on systematics that have been important and distinguishing factors in our analysis, including photometric redshift uncertainties, systematics from higher order PSF moments, and uncertainties in the modeling of baryonic feedback. I will show that we have made a number of conservative choices to ensure that our analysis is robust to these systematics and share some lessons learned that will enable future surveys to hopefully no longer be limited by such systematics.
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Speaker: Raquel Castillo Fernandez (University of Texas Arlington)- Title: In the hunt for 0νββ at the NEXT experiment
2023-05-12 12:00 - 13:00
This is an In-Person [HYBRID] Event
LOCATION: Sessler Conference Room – 50A – 5132
DATE: May 12, 2023
TIME: 12:00- 1:00 PM
TITLE: In the hunt for 0νββ at the NEXT experiment
ABSTRACT: In the last decades, oscillation experiments have demonstrated that neutrinos are not massless particles, and the lepton number is not conserved. Thus, revealing the nature of neutrino masses is one of the major goals in particle physics, and the observation of the neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) has been identified as the most practical way to establish that neutrinos are Majorana particles, that is, fermions equivalent to their antiparticles. However, 0νββ, which would violate the lepton number by two units, has not been observed yet and the best limits to the half-life of this process exceed 10ˆ26 yr. An extraordinary effort by several experimental collaborations is ongoing to achieve this ambitious goal and to explore the possibilities to understand the underlying physics of this process, among them, the NEXT experiment aims at the competitive search for the 0νββ decay in 136Xe using high-pressure gas electroluminescent time projection chambers (TPCs). In this talk, I will discuss the status of the current prototypes that are under installation, NEXT-100 and NEXT-CRAB, and some of the main challenges and virtues of the 0νββ search.
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Speaker: Antoine Armatol-Title:Investigation of the Majorana nature of neutrinos at a few meV level of the neutrino mass scale: from CUPID to BINGO
2023-05-05 12:00 - 13:00
This is an In-Person [HYBRID] Event
LOCATION: Sessler Conference Room – 50A – 5132
DATE: May 5, 2023
TIME: 12:00- 1:00 PM
TITLE: Investigation of the Majorana nature of neutrinos at a few meV level of the neutrino mass scale: from CUPID to BINGO
ABSTRACT: The search for neutrinoless double beta decay (0ν2β) is one of the biggest experimental challenges of contemporary physics. Its discovery would be ground- breaking since it would prove the Majorana nature of neutrinos, give an insight into neutrino mass scale, and provide clues to explain the matter/antimatter asymmetry of our Universe. Cryogenic calorimeters are promising devices for this purpose as CUORE, the ton-scale experiment constructed with such detectors, is demonstrating by setting the most stringent limit on Te-130 0ν2β half-life and being one of the most sensitive current generation experiments. However, its sensitivity is limited by the background. Its successor, the next-generation experiment CUPID, will reach a higher sensitivity by reducing the number of expected background events in the region of interest. It will study as the candidate isotope Mo-100 embedded inside Li2MoO4 scintillating crystals, which allows mitigating the Ɣ background naturally while also introducing a dual heat/light readout using an auxiliary Ge bolometer to get rid of the α background. Thanks to that, CUPID will improve the CUORE sensitivity by two orders of magnitude. At that point, if 0ν2β still eludes us, the background reduction must be pushed even further. BINGO is a project aiming to prepare the next-next generation of bolometric experiments by proposing innovations and methods for that purpose. For example, it will reduce the remaining Ɣ and β background contributions thanks to respectively a cryogenic active veto and a revolutionary detector assembly. BINGO will demonstrate that, once implemented in a ton-scale isotope experiment, its improvements will allow the latter to reach a sensitivity to neutrino mass scale below 10 meV. In that talk, the current status of the CUPID experiment will be discussed and the R&D work done in the framework of the BINGO project will be presented.
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NO INPA SEMINAR TODAY
2023-04-28 12:00 - 13:00, 2023-04-21 12:00 - 13:00, 2023-03-10 12:00 - 13:00

SPEAKER: Prof. Christian Weinheimer (University of Münster)-TITLE: The dark matter experiment XENONnT and first WIMP results
2023-04-14 12:00 - 13:00
This is an In-Person [HYBRID] Event
LOCATION: Sessler Conference Room – 50A – 5132
DATE: April 14, 2023
TIME: 12:00- 1:00 PM
TITLE: The dark matter experiment XENONnT and first WIMP results
ABSTRACT: Evidence for about 6 times more matter in the universe than normal
matter is coming from cosmological observations and analyses on all
scales. What this exotic dark matter is remains still a secret.
The direct search experiment for dark matter XENONnT located at the
Italian underground laboratory LNGS is looking for weakly interacting
massive particles (WIMPs) and other rare event physics. As an upgrade of
the previous experiment XENON1T it uses a dual-phase time projection
chamber with a total mass of 8.5t of liquid xenon. The recent electron
recoil data from a 1.16 t*yr exposure of XENONnT allowed to set
stringent limits on solar axions, an enhanced neutrino magnetic moment
and bosonic dark matter. XENONnT’s unprecedented low background
originates from very careful material selecting and screening as well as
from active removal of Kr-85 and Rn-222 by cryogenic distillation. This
low background rate allows for a rich physics search program with
XENONnT with WIMPs being the main objective.
In this talk the status of the XENONnt experiment and its first WIMP
search results from a blind analysis in an energy range between 3.1 keV
and 60.0 keV and an exposure of approximately 1.1 tonne-year is presented.”
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SPEAKER: Lisa Schlueter (TU Munich)-TITLE: Neutrino-Mass Analysis with sub-eV Sensitivity and Search for Light Sterile Neutrinos with the KATRIN Experiment
2023-04-11 12:00 - 13:00
SPECIAL INPA SEMINAR
This is an In-Person [HYBRID] Event
LOCATION: Sessler Conference Room – 50A – 5132
DATE: April 11, 2023
TIME: 12:00 pm
TITLE: Neutrino-Mass Analysis with sub-eV Sensitivity and Search for Light Sterile Neutrinos with the KATRIN Experiment
ABSTRACT: The KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment is designed to determine the effective mass of the electron-antineutrino with a target sensitivity of 200 meV/c2 (90% C.L.) in a direct and model-independent way. KATRIN uses a strong gaseous windowless Tritium source associated with a large high-resolution spectrometer (MAC-E filter) to analyze precisely the electron energies from the source. The neutrino mass can be inferred from the shape of the tritium β-decay spectrum in the endpoint region. After global commissioning of the apparatus with Tritium in 2018, KATRIN started its first neutrino mass measurement campaign in spring 2019. This talk presents the data and the analysis of the first two measurement campaigns. In terms of effective electron antineutrino mass, an upper limit of 0.8 eV (90% C.L.) could be inferred, reaching for the first time into the sub-eV regime. Moreover, to exploit the full physics potential of the KATRIN experiment, a search for light sterile neutrinos was conducted. As no sterile-neutrino signal is observed, exclusion contours are drawn at 95% C.L. covering the parameter space of the long-persisting light-sterile neutrino anomalies to a great extent.
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Speaker: Gabriela Rodrigues Araujo (University of Zurich)- Title: Light-sheet microscopy of color centers: A new venue for neutrino and dark matter detection with passive crystals
2023-04-10 16:00 - 17:00
SPECIAL INPA SEMINAR
This is an In-Person [HYBRID] Event
LOCATION: Sessler Conference Room – 50A – 5132
DATE: April 10, 2023
TIME: 4:00 pm
TITLE: Light-sheet microscopy of color centers: A new venue for neutrino and dark matter detection with passive crystals
ABSTRACT: Most of the techniques currently used to detect nuclear recoils from dark matter and neutrinos rely on the collection of charge, prompt scintillation photons or phonons. In this talk, I will discuss a new approach: The use of light-sheet fluorescence microscopy to detect a specific type of crystal defect, so called color centers (CCs), which could be induced by nuclear recoils in solid-state materials. Since CCs require little energy to form (10-50 eV), the proposed detectors can search for particle interactions at unexplored low-energy regions. Despite the nm-size of these defects, excited CCs re-emit color in the visible range, a feature that facilitates their detection. To make this detection channel competitive for rare-event search, a fast imaging method of single CCs is necessary. The PALEOCCENE collaboration works towards this goal: a scalable read-out of CCs for passive detectors of neutrinos and dark matter. In the talk I will discuss the concept, the current R&D and possible applications for dark matter, CEvNS, and nuclear-nonproliferation safeguards.
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SPEAKER: Noah Sailer (UC Berkeley)- Title: Accurate cosmology from CMB lensing and galaxy surveys
2023-04-07 12:00 - 13:00
This is an In-Person [HYBRID] Event
Date: April 7, 2023
Time: 12:00- 1:00 pm
Location: Sessler Conference Room- 50A-5132

Speaker: Noah Sailer (UC Berkeley)
Title: Accurate cosmology from CMB lensing and galaxy surveys
Abstract:
Joint analyses of CMB lensing and spectroscopically-calibrated galaxies have the ability to measure the evolution of matter fluctuations out to high redshifts without the complications of photometric redshift uncertainties and intrinsic alignments. These measurements are rapidly becoming one of the more powerful tools in a cosmologist’s toolkit, enabling precise (and accurate) inference of cosmological parameters and potential deviations from ΛCDM. While cross-correlations are typically more robust against systematic effects, correlated systematics arising from (extra)galactic foreground contamination and masking induce significant biases if not properly accounted for. I will discuss progress towards mitigating these effects, the implementation of these methods in an ongoing cross-correlation analysis of DESI luminous red galaxies and CMB lensing from ACT, and the prospects of future analyses with Stage-V spectroscopy and CMB-S4.

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SPEAKER: Agnes Ferte (KIPAC, SLAC)-TITLE: Preparing for discovery of new physics with the Rubin Observatory
2023-03-31 12:00 - 13:00
This is an In-Person [HYBRID] Event
LOCATION: Sessler Conference Room – 50A – 5132
DATE: March 31, 2023
TIME: 12:00 PM
TITLE: Preparing for discovery of new physics with the Rubin Observatory
ABSTRACT: The coming decade will offer a unique opportunity to tests physics using cosmological probes, thanks to the new generation of galaxy surveys such as LSST by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and CMB experiments. We will be able to test dark energy and the laws of gravity on cosmic scales with unprecedented precision, both through the evolution of the background and growth of structures in the Universe. I will explain the multiprobe analysis we performed, especially focusing on weak gravitational lensing, and results we obtained using Dark Energy Survey data (arxiv:2207.05766), precursor of LSST. I will then describe how such analyses with future data are shaping and the gaps left to fill. I will end by describing the status of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, under construction in Chile and its future.
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[NO INPA SPEAKER] -SPEAKER: TBA
2023-03-24 12:00 - 13:00
[NO INPA SPEAKER] – FRIDAY, MARCH 24, 2023
This is an In-Person [HYBRID] Event
LOCATION: Sessler Conference Room – 50A – 5132
DATE: March 24, 2023
TIME: 12:00 PM
TITLE: TBA
ABSTRACT: TBA
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[EVENT CANCELED]:SPEAKER: Jonathan Echevers (UCB)-TITLE: The EXO program: Neutrinoless Double-Beta Decay Searches in Xe-136
2023-03-17 12:00 - 13:00
EVENT CANCELED
This is an In-Person [HYBRID] Event
LOCATION: Sessler Conference Room – 50A – 5132
DATE: March 17, 2023
TIME: 12:00 PM
TITLE: The EXO program: Neutrinoless Double-Beta Decay Searches in Xe-136
ABSTRACT: Neutrinoless double beta (0vBB) decay is currently one of the most compelling searches in nuclear and particle physics. If found, it would imply the existence of Majorana fermions and lepton number violation, both new physics beyond the Standard Model. The EXO-200 experiment consisted of a time projection chamber (TPC) with 200 kg of enriched liquid xenon (LXe), optimized to search for 0vBB of Xe-136. Data acquisition took place from 2011 to the end of 2018, with a total exposure of 234.1kg yr. We found no statistically significant evidence for 0vBB, leading to a lower limit on the half-life of 3.5×10^25 yr at the 90% confidence level (CL). The ultra-low background necessary for this search also provides a unique opportunity to probe other exotic processes, such as Lorentz violation in double-beta decay, electron recoils from dark matter, Majoron emitting modes of double-beta decay, and others. The first part of this talk will focus on the EXO-200 experiment and recent results for exotic-physics searches using this detector. In the second half of this presentation I will discuss the next generation experiment, nEXO, a 5 tonne LXe TPC with a projected 0vBB half-life sensitivity of 1.35×10^28 yr at the 90% CL in 10 years of data-taking.
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Speaker: Daniel Carney (LBL)-TITLE: Proposal for a Levitated Invisible Particle Sensor
2023-03-03 12:00 - 13:00
This is an In-Person [HYBRID] Event
LOCATION: Sessler Conference Room – 50A – 5132
DATE: March 3, 2023
TIME: 12:00 PM
TITLE: Proposal for a Levitated Invisible Particle Sensor
ABSTRACT: Recently Dave Moore (Yale), Kyle Leach (Mines) and I proposed the use of a levitated mechanical quantum sensor combined with a pixelated electron/photon detector to look for invisible particles, particularly heavy sterile neutrinos in the keV-MeV range. The basic device consists of ~100nm scale silica spheres implanted with radioisotopes. When the isotope decays, via beta or electron capture, it will generically eject e-/gammas as well as a neutrino which escape the nanosphere, while the daughter atom is trapped in the sphere and causes it to recoil. With measurement precision on the sphere recoil at the “standard quantum limit”–which we have already achieved in a similar device at Yale–one can kinematically reconstruct the emitted neutrino momentum. I’ll outline how this works, compare it to previous AMO-y approaches (e.g. HUNTER), and talk about what we’d like to do at LBL.
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NO SPEAKER TODAY- FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2023
2023-02-23 12:00 - 13:00

SPEAKER: R.G. Hamish Robertson (Univ of Washington)- TITLE: The direct road to neutrino mass
2023-02-17 12:00 - 13:00
This is an In-Person [HYBRID] Event
LOCATION: Sessler Conference Room – 50A – 5132
DATE: February 17, 2023
TIME: 12:00 PM
TITLE: The direct road to neutrino mass
ABSTRACT: The discovery of neutrino oscillations gave us proof that neutrinos have mass, a direct contradiction of the minimal standard model of particle physics. But how much mass? Oscillations cannot give a number for the mass, other than that the average of the three masses must be at least 0.02 eV. The mass is needed to build the new standard model, and to help pin down such things as the equation of state of dark energy and the evolution of structure in cosmology. KATRIN, the first new laboratory experiment on the beta spectrum of tritium in more than 20 years, has now shown the mass to be no greater than 0.8 eV. KATRIN continues toward its sensitivity goal of 0.2 eV. If the mass is not in this range, a very different approach called “Project 8” has passed proof-of-concept tests with a scheme that might have even greater sensitivity.
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SPEAKER: Alexander Leder (UCB) – TITLE: Current status of the cavity and resonance based experiments
2023-02-10 12:00 - 13:00
This is an In-Person [HYBRID] Event
LOCATION: Sessler Conference Room – 50A – 5132
DATE: February 10, 2023
TIME: 12:00 PM
TITLE: Current status of the cavity and resonance based experiments
ABSTRACT: Axions are a well-motivated dark matter candidate, which currently have a wide open and accessible parameter space, with few constraints on their mass and coupling strength to photons. On the higher end of the mass range (> 1 GHz), experiments such as HAYSTAC or ADMX seek to measure the coupling of axions to the photon inside a resonant cavity, making use of better than standard quantum limit sensors and very high Q values. On the lower end (between 5 kHz – 5 MHz), resonant experiments such The DMRadio-50L experiment seeks to explore a wide portion of this axion parameter space, taking advantage of lumped element high-Q resonators with optimal out-of-band sensitivity. In this talk, I will present an overview of the current status of the cavity and resonance based experiments currently underway to fully explore the over 22 orders of magnitude currently available to us.
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SPEAKER: Arun Persaud (LBNL-ATAP) - TITLE: Applications of Associate Particle Imaging at Berkeley Lab from Carbon in Soil to Nuclear Data
2023-02-03 12:00 - 13:00
This is an In-Person [HYBRID] Event
LOCATION: Sessler Conference Room – 50A – 5132
DATE: February 3, 2023
TIME: 12:00 PM
TITLE: Applications of Associate Particle Imaging at Berkeley Lab from Carbon in Soil to Nuclear Data
ABSTRACT: We developed an Associated Particle Imaging(API) system that uses inelastic neutron scattering reactions to measure 3d density maps for individual elements in a target area. We apply this method to measuring carbon in soil for agricultural applications, e.g. quantifying carbon sequestration. We also have used API recently together with colleagues from NASA and APL to calibrate neutron detectors and for precise measurement of cross sections as well as planned bulk density measurements of meteorites. In this talk, we will give an overview of API as a technique and these applications.
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SPEAKER: Daniel Kodroff (Penn State University) - TITLE: Background Modeling and First Results From The LUX-ZEPLIN Dark Matter Experiment
2022-11-18 12:00 - 13:00 | 50A-5132- Sessler, 50A-5132 Sessler Conference Room, CA
This is a VIRTUAL Event
TITLE: Background Modeling and First Results From The LUX-ZEPLIN Dark Matter Experiment
ABSTRACT: LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) is a dark matter experiment located at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, USA employing a 7 tonne active volume of liquid xenon in a dual-phase time projection chamber (TPC). It’s surrounded by an instrumented xenon “skin” region and gadolinium-loaded liquid scintillator outer detector, primarily serving as active vetoes for gamma-ray and neutron backgrounds, respectively, all contained within an ultra-pure water tank. A comprehensive material
assay and selection campaign for detector components, along with a xenon purification campaign, have further ensured an ultra-low background environment. These mitigations have allowed LZ to achieve a background rate of (63.0 ± 4.5) x 10−6 events/keVee/kg/day in the low energy region, approximately 60 times lower than that of its predecessor LUX experiment. In this low background region, LZ has recently set new world-leading limits for the spin-independent elastic scattering of nuclear recoils of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) with masses above 9 GeV/c^2 using an exposure of 60 live days and a fiducial mass of 5.5 tonnes. This talk will provide an overview of the LZ detector and a description of its backgrounds with an emphasis on techniques to constrain these backgrounds in situ. I will also discuss the first results from LZ and briefly discuss its future science program.
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SPEAKER - Nick Kokron (Stanford University) - TITLE: Pen-and-Paper Meets Supercomputing: Building Accurate Models for Cosmological Surveys
2022-11-16 12:00 - 13:00
LOCATION: IN-PERSON – Sessler Conference Room Building 50A-5132
TITLE: Pen-and-Paper Meets Supercomputing: Building Accurate Models for Cosmological Surveys
ABSTRACT: Stage-IV cosmological surveys are poised to revolutionize our understanding of the Universe. The vast data sets collected by surveys like DESI, Rubin and CMB-S4 will be orders of magnitude more powerful than their precursors from the last decade, and will significantly sharpen our understanding of unknown properties of the Universe. These include the properties of dark energy, the masses of neutrinos and the fundamental nature of the primordial fluctuations in the early Universe. However the statistical uncertainties of upcoming observations are so small that models for the statistics we measure are not yet accurate enough to analyze their whole datasets. I will introduce a program of research dedicated to addressing the challenge of accurately modelling these data and making our cosmological surveys the most powerful they can be. This program is underpinned by a fruitful marriage of traditionally disparate techniques — supercomputer simulations and pen-and-paper calculations — to describe the growth and evolution of large-scale structure in the Universe. I will show that their combination is more powerful than the sum of its parts, and will play a key role in extracting the most amount of information from DESI and its cross-correlations with weak and CMB lensing surveys in the coming future.
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SPEAKER - Peter Craig (LBNL) - TITLE: "Effects of Microlensing on Time Delay Measurements from Strongly Lensed Supernovae"
2022-11-11 12:00 - 13:00 | 50A-5132 / https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED] One Cyclotron Road, 50A-5132, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
ABSTRACT: Strongly lensed supernovae are highly valuable cosmological probes, sensitive to both the Hubble constant and the distribution of dark matter. Measuring time delays in strong lensing systems allows for independent measurements of the Hubble constant, providing a mechanism to resolve the current Hubble tension. These time delays are also sensitive to the dark matter substructures located along the line of sight. Microlensing effects from stars in the lensing galaxy can contaminate measurements of the time delays, making some methods for measuring time delays unreliable. We consider methods for measuring time delays with both Type Ia and Type II-P supernovae by simulating spectra in microlensing systems. Both types of supernovae may be effectively used to measure the Hubble constant, especially with the number of detections that are expected with LSST and the Roman Space Telescope. These measurements can also be used to constrain the properties of dark matter substructure given a sufficient number of systems. We’ve also been working on understanding the local distributions of dark matter using an “acceleration ladder” built using local direct acceleration measurements combined with dynamical constraints on the Milky Way potential.

Speaker: Dan Werthimer (UC Berkeley (SETI) "What's New in SETI and High Performance Signal Processing, and The PANOSETI IR/Visible Ultra-Wide Field Nanosecond Time Scale Transient Search"
2022-11-04 12:00 - 13:00 | 50A-5132 / https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED] One Cyclotron Road, 50A-5132, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
Abstract:
Dan will review current and SETI radio and optical searches, and also review CASPER open source technologies for real time signal processing instrumentation. The CASPER collaboration develops open source hardware, software, GPUware, FPGA gateware, tools, libraries, reference designs, tutorials, training videos, and workshops for astronomy instrumentation.
CASPER instrumentation is utilized mostly for radio astronomy, but also for physics, medicine, genomics, and engineering. More info at http://casper.berkeley.edu
The PANOSETI experiment searches a largely unexplored parameter space, observing a large field of view simultaneously (4,450 degrees) for nanosecond to second time scale transients at visible and near-IR wavelengths. The PANOSETI observatory employs two domes separated by ~1 km. Data from the two domes is cross-correlated to distinguish between astrophysical events and atmospheric phenomena (eg: Cherenkov radiation). Each PANOSETI dome contains ~45 telescopes; each telescope covers a 10 by 10 degree field. We have deployed a prototype PANOSETI observatory at Lick Observatory; where we also plan to build a full scale system. The small aperture, wide field-of-view, and low cost of the PANOSETI telescopes make them well-suited for high energy gamma-ray astronomy.

Henry Klest (Stony Brook University) Physics and Detectors at Nuclear Colliders: Prospective interdisciplinary measurements and technologies at U.S based facilities in the coming decades
2022-10-28 12:00 - 13:00 | 50A-5132 / https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED] One Cyclotron Road, 50A-5132, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
Abstract:
High energy nuclear physics in the U.S. is undergoing a revitalization 22 years after the turn on of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab. Two major upcoming experimental efforts, sPHENIX at RHIC, planned to turn on next year, and the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), planned to start running in 2032, are coming to fruition. With these new facilities come new opportunities to explore physics and hardware complementarity with other fields. In this talk, I will briefly discuss the heavy ion program at RHIC, focusing on the design and construction of the sPHENIX TPC. I will also outline some of the planned measurements and detector technologies for the EIC and their generic applications to other fields.

NO INPA SEMINAR TODAY 10/21/2022
2022-10-21 12:00 - 13:00

Jeff Cooke (Swinburne University) "The Keck Wide-Field Imager and the future direction of the Keck Observatory"
2022-10-07 12:00 - 13:00 | 50A-5132 / https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED] One Cyclotron Road, 50A-5132, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
ABSTRACT:
The Keck Wide-Field Imager (KWFI) is a 1 degree diameter field of view wide-field optical imager for Keck that will be the most powerful wide-field imager in the world for the foreseeable future. KWFI has extreme sensitivity from 10000A down to 3000A that will enable new science from the high redshift Universe, to time-domain science, to the local Universe and the solar system that cannot be done on any other existing or planned telescope for decades. We have now entered into the era of next-generation facilities, including JWST and NASA Roman space telescope, the Cherenkov Telescope Array, the Square Kilometre Array, LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA, Subaru Prime Focus Spectrograph, Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer, and 30m-class telescopes, with larger, more sensitive facilities in planning for the next decades, such as the Cosmic Explorer, LISA, LUVOIR, and others. In this talk, I will discuss how KWFI’s extremely deep, wide-field imaging is vital for nearly all science cases for these facilities (many are billion-dollar facilities) operating at all wavelengths and how it will greatly extend their reach. KWFI will excel at targeted science programs, which make up the bulk of all Keck community science. I will discuss the status and continued progress of KWFI and development of a deployable secondary mirror to enable new science and fast imaging and spectroscopy capability in the same night.
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