Events on Tuesday, December 12th, 2023
- Preliminary Exam
- Subatomic to Supernova: Two unrelated tales of neutrinos and dark matter
- Time: 12:30 pm - 6:00 pm
- Place: 2314 Chamberlin
- Speaker: Daniel Heimsoth, Physics PhD Graduate Student
- Abstract: I will present my work on two recent papers. First, supernovae expel a large fraction of their energy in neutrinos, making them a potentially useful detection channel to understand properties of stellar core collapse. With the construction of new, larger neutrino experiments such as Hyper-Kamiokande, DUNE, and IceCube Gen2 in the near future, we will have the capability to measure the time-dependent neutrino flux from nearby core-collapse supernovae. I will show how using the neutrino signal from a theorized hadron-quark phase transition during core collapse can allow us to not only triangulate the position of the supernova in the sky to good precision but also set limits on the absolute neutrino mass scale.
Turning our attention from neutrinos to dark matter, I will then describe my work on quantifying uncertainties in direct detection dark matter experiments stemming from uncertainties in nuclear modeling. As these experiments shift from considering only the spin-independent and spin-dependent operators to a complete set of operators coupling dark matter to nuclei, it becomes especially important to understand all sources of uncertainty. I will explain how we calculated the nuclear model uncertainties for xenon, a common choice of target in direct detection experiments, and how these uncertainties can be significantly large for certain operators. - Host: Baha Balantekin
- Thesis Defense
- Synthetic Source Injection in The Dark Energy Survey: Measurements of the Survey Transfer Function and Applications to Precision Cosmology
- Time: 2:00 pm - 6:00 pm
- Place: B343 Sterling
- Speaker: Megan Tabbutt, Physics PhD Graduate Student
- Abstract: Presented here is the Dark Energy Survey’s (DES) Synthetic Source Injection (SSI) methodology and applications to precision cosmology for our Y6 analysis of large-scale structure. Our methodology is predicated on injecting models of real objects obtained from our very high signal-to-noise Deep Field observations into our single-epoch wide field images Both of which are critical to the measurements of the three 2-point correlation functions, cosmic shear, galaxy clustering and galaxy-galaxy lensing, from which we constrain cosmological parameters. This methodology was introduced for our Y3 analysis, and was the first example of using SSI to directly calibrate the cosmological measurements from a WF survey. The refinement and expansion of the methodology is presented here. Specifically, we improved our mirroring of the WF image processing pipeline to now fully recreate it. We refactored our code-base to be able to run our SSI at multiple super-computing centers, minimizing wall time and maximizing allocations. We also developed a new injection scheme that injects sources which are preferentially more useful to the cosmological analyses. These as well as other updates, our initial Y6 SSI results, and their applications to precision cosmology will be discussed at length in this thesis. which are then processed identically to the original wide images. Inherent to this methodology, is that the synthetic sources automatically inherit the same systematics of the real wide field data, a highly sought after achievement for many systematics modeling pipelines that is nearly impossible to achieve from forward modeling techniques alone. In the end, we obtain wide field photometry catalogs of the deep field objects including their inheritance of the systematics. These catalogs are a Monte Carlo sampling of the transfer function of the survey and can be used for calibration and diagnostics, as well as aid in the calculation and validation of our 3x2pt analysis and consequentially our measurement of cosmological parameter constraints. Specifically, through the photometric redshift calibration of the weak lensing sources and the magnification bias estimate for the lens galaxy samples.
- Host: Keith Bechtol
- Network in Neutrinos, Nuclear Astrophysics, and Symmetries (N3AS) Seminar
- Finding the neutrino mass mechanism at muon colliders
- Time: 2:00 pm
- Place: Join Zoom Meeting Meeting ID: 912 3071 4547
- Speaker: Kåre Fridell , KEK, Tsukuba
- Abstract: In this talk I will show how neutrino mass mechanisms may be probed in
future muon colliders, with special emphasis on the proposed μTRISTAN
experiment. If neutrinos are Majorana particles, they may lead to
charged lepton flavor violating processes that would constitute clear
evidence for New Physics in the lepton sector. Using an effective field
theory framework, we then compare the potential discovery reach with
existing limits from rare lepton decays, finding that muon colliders are
the most sensitive probe of charged lepton flavor violation for a range
of parameters. As a model example, we then consider the type-ii seesaw
model, and show how a muon collider could be used to constrain the CP-
violating phases of the corresponding PMNS matrix.
- Host: Baha Balantekin