Fall 2013

The LNS Student Seminar is a weekly gathering of Experimental Nuclear and Particle Physics students to learn from each other and to enjoy a nice lunch. On this first seminar of the new year, I want to welcome the new students and encourage them to get to know each other as well as older students. Some of the best help on the hardest problems I've tackled has come from talking with peers and getting to know the tricks and tools that they use.

In this opening seminar, I will present my ideas for the upcoming year. I want to make the seminar a better venue for practicing scientific talks. For that reason, we will be adding abstracts, timing, and a feedback system. Good scientific talks are extremely rare but are something that we should all demand from ourselves. Advice on how to give a good talk is a touchy subject, and I don't claim any special knowledge. But I have seen a lot of talks, and I see some patterns in the ways that they fail. These are things that I try to avoid and I hope you will too.

The OLYMPUS Experiment, which completed data-taking at the DORIS e⁺/e^- storage ring at DESY in Hamburg, Germany in January 2013, seeks to definitively determine the two-photon contribution to lepton-proton elastic scattering. This measurement is motivated by an attempt to resolve a large standing discrepancy in measurements of the ratio of the electric and magnetic form factors of the proton. This talk will provide an overview of elastic scattering measurements, the OLYMPUS spectrometer, and the status of the OLYMPUS Experiment.

I will describe the current status of the Higgs to ZZ to four lepton analysis at CMS, including observed signal strength, spin/parity hypotheses, and pT spectra.

Angular quantities cannot be treated in the same way as quantities like energies and distances. Analyzing directional data requires special techniques, which are not always known to physicists. This talk will give an overview of these techniques and their applications to DMTPC.

Recent results from short baseline neutrino experiments have reignited interest in ~1 eV sterile neutrinos. I will review several anomalies in short baseline neutrino experiments and attempt to resolve the tension between these datasets and constraints from other experiments using models with one, two, and three sterile neutrino states. The results of global fits show that sterile neutrino models can help to resolve some but not all of the tension among the datasets. Ultimately, additional experiments are needed to determine if recent short baseline anomalies are due to the existence of sterile neutrinos.

All known mesons are consistent with the gluons being in the ground state. Lattice QCD predicts states with excited gluons. These states would have quantum numbers that would be otherwise disallowed for a quark-antiquark pair. If these states exist, GlueX will find them. An essential component of this search is determining the strangeness content of the final state. We are implementing a cerenkov pid system for this purpose in order to separate pions from kaons.

Mississippi State Axion Search (MASS) is an search experiment to search for axion like particles using a novel light shining through a wall technique. The experimental setup consists of two tuned vacuum cavities placed under a very strong magnetic field and separated by a wall. While one of the cavities houses a strong EM field generator, the other (dark) cavity houses the detector systems. The electronics consists of multi-stage amplifier system, each based on SR510 lock in amplifiers and PCI-D high speed data cards. The experiment is scheduled to run up to April 2015. The theory leading up to light axions will be previewed highlighting different experimental approaches to search for axions which spanned 8 orders of magnitude in mass. A number of interesting experiments and their results will be shown. Projected sensitivity of MASS for light axions and para-photons will be illustrated showing its projected impact on a wider scale amongst other axion search experiments. Results from the systematics and background studies will be presented.

Topic: Non-standard neutrino interactions.

In this talk, I will summarize the state of modern-day observational experiments regarding the Cosmic Microwave Background. I will frame the discussion in terms of particle physics: what can the CMB teach us about particles and vice versa?

Project 8 is a new experiment which will eventually utilize high precision spectroscopy of tritium beta electrons to determine the neutrino mass. The underlying novel spectroscopic technique nondestructively measures the energy of keV electrons by observing the weak radio signal these electrons emit through cyclotron gyration in a strong magnetic field. Recently, data were taken to demonstrate the feasibility of the method using conversion electrons from krypton as a substitute for beta electrons from tritium decay. Results from the analysis of this data taking run are presented.

Topic: Direct Detection of Dark Matter

A polarized ³He beam in RHIC would effectively provide the world's first high-energy polarized neutron beam in a collider. With existing polarized proton beams, this would enable new, unique high-energy QCD studies of neutron structure, and tests of the Standard Model in a future eRHIC. Development of a source of polarized ³He⁺⁺ ions, leveraging metastability-exchange optical pumping and the new RHIC Electron Beam Ion Source, is ongoing at MIT with a test of concept at BNL planned for fall 2013. An overview of the design, ongoing hardware development, and future plans will be presented.

A comprehensive motivation for photon-jet correlation measurements will be given followed by a detailed comparison between the CMS and ATLAS photon-jet correlation results. A comparison to LBT theoretical curves is also included.

The KATRIN experiment aims to determine mass of the neutrino with a sensitivity down to 200meV from tritium beta decay. To perform this measurement KATRIN uses a massive magnetic adiabatic collimation electrostatic (MAC-E) filter as an integrating spectrometer to measure the shape of the tritium beta decay spectrum near the end point. Understanding the motion of the beta decay electrons from the source to the detector is a key challenge in this experiment which requires a detailed knowledge of the electromagnetic fields involved. The boundary element method (BEM) is the primary tool used for computing the electrostatic field, and is currently being augmented with the fast multipole method (FMM) to provide fast particle tracking. A general overview of these methods with applications to the KATRIN experiment will be presented.