Fall 2018

With the great diversity of research groups and topics in the experimental portion of LNS, this introductory seminar is meant to orient the first year graduate students about research ongoing in nuclear and particle experiment at MIT.

Neutrino physics is entering an age of precision measurements. A number of experiments have firmly established the existence of neutrino oscillations and determined the corresponding squared mass differences and mixing angles. These measurements have provided unambiguous evidence that neutrinos have non-vanishing masses. The large θ 13 mixing angle will enable future experiments to search for leptonic CP violation in appearance mode, thus addressing one of the outstanding fundamental problems of particle physics. These searches will involve high precision determinations of the oscillation parameters, which in turn require a deep understanding of neutrino interactions with the atomic nuclei comprising the detectors. In view of the achieved and planned experimental accuracies, the treatment of nuclear effects is indeed regarded as one of the main sources of systematic uncertainty. In this context, a key role is played by the availability of a wealth of electron scattering data. In this analysis, data from the CLAS detector at Jefferson Lab have been used to test the accuracy of the neutrino energy reconstruction methods against the predictions of the commonly used GENIE neutrino event generator.

Here, I present the technical description of the DarkLight* gas target and the calibration results of the gas target. A new force carrier A', if exists, is believed to reconcile existing anomalies such as muon g-2 according to careful calculations, followed by the relevant experimental searches including the BaBar, the HADES, the APEX and so on. None of these showed strong evidence that validates this scenario, and yet there was a report claims a 6.8 σ-level evidence of A' through the Be8 anomaly. In this background, the DarkLight experiment has been proposed to focus on the low mass search for the A'. The collaboration have assembled the target In the Bates Research and Engineering Center and tested the devices to control and measure the target density. *Detecting A Resonance Kinematically with electrons Incident on a Gaseous Hydrogen Target

Almost every dark matter talk mentions the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) as a piece of evidence for the existence of dark matter. You might have also heard that cosmology can put constraints on neutrino masses (to be more precise, the sum of neutrino mass). However, it may not be immediately obvious how exactly they are the case, to us experimental nuclear and particle students (and we often just don’t bother to dig in to it). In this talk, I’d like to explore these issues in (slightly) more detail. After a brief introduction to the relevant cosmology concepts, I will explain what CMB is (e.g. what exactly you are looking at when people show you the CMB power spectrum) and the basic physics of it. I will then move on to addressing how exactly CMB can tell us about dark matter and neutrinos. The talk will be rather qualitative and focusing on building the physics intuition.

To many people, Halloween is not a single day of the year. It is a season. A season, that in fact, is currently in full swing. October is a fantastic time celebrating a holiday that means so many things to different people, and out of this has spawned a community of haunted attractions. But, these are no longer your mom and pop's "spooky cemeteries" with a couple of foam tombstones. Haunted attractions have become a $300 million dollar industry, and currently outnumber the number of Targets in the US by almost a factor of two. I have worked at several haunted attractions over the past 10 years, as well as going to some conventions, and with this knowledge I will try and draw back the curtain of the industry, and the amazing people involved. And of course, share lots of fun stories about getting kicked in the face, dancing with strangers, and scaring large burly men into the fetal position.

Topic: describe how experiments can probe the quake gluon plasma

In astroparticle physics, as in Earth-based particle physics, new physics searches often involve looking for a statistically significant "bump" of excess events above some (hopefully well-modeled) background. However, the unique environment of space-based surveys presents several challenges for new physics searches, while also providing the opportunity to probe phenomena completely inaccessible to terrestrial experiments. In this talk, I will discuss why we don't always know if a bump results from, e.g., decaying dark matter or some "boring" astrophysical process, opine on the unique issues presented when calibrating a detector in space, and conclude with some of the not-dark-matter-but-still-interesting results enabled by recent missions like NuSTAR, XMM-Newton, and Fermi. I will also likely show some pretty astrophysical images, as is tradition for these talks.

Practice Research Talk: DarkLight

Research Talk: Ricochet Experiment

Topic: Explain the Stellar and Solar Nuclear Burning Cycle