The MINOS experiment is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment based at Fermilab. MINOS studies the interactions of neutrinos produced by the Fermilab NuMI beam line in two detectors, 734 km apart. Comparisons of the energy spectra and beam composition at the two sites yield precision measurements of neutrino oscillations. MINOS ended its highly successful run in the spring of this year. In this talk, I will give an overview of the most recent results from MINOS, including the muon neutrino disappearance and electron neutrino appearance results from the complete data set and the updated neutrino time-of-flight measurement.

http://uhhep.phys.uh.edu/~whitehead/Whitehead_MINOS_VATech_20120912.pdf

The theme of this year's SLAC Summer Institute, held from July 23 to August 3 in Stanford California, was "The Electroweak Scale: Unraveling the Mysteries at the LHC." It focused on the recent LHC results and their implications for the physics at the Electroweak scale and beyond. In this talk, I will review the statistical analyses required to interpret the experimental data, and how to read all the experimental results, with particular emphasis on the Higgs boson search. The latest Higgs search results will be also be reviewed, as well as the prospects of future discoveries.

The EXO (Enriched Xenon Observatory) experiment is searching for neutrinoless double beta decay of Xe-136. Such a process would violate conservation of lepton number, and its discovery would prove that neutrinos are Majorana particles, as well as determine the absolute mass scale of neutrinos. In its current implementation, called EXO-200, the experiment uses a time projection chamber filled with O(100) kg of liquid xenon, enriched in Xe-136 isotope. The detector was designed and constructed to provide extremely low levels of background contamination, and is operated half a mile underground at the WIPP facility close to Carlsbad, New Mexico. In August 2011, the EXO collaboration was the first to successfully measure the two-neutrino mode of the double beta decay of Xe-136, and in May 2012 placed a limit on the neutrinoless mode (T1/2 >1.6e25 years @90C.L.) In this talk I will describe the EXO-200 design, present its latest physics results, and give an outlook for the next generation of the experiment.

As famously established by Bell, there exists a bound on the strength of correlattions between measurement outcomes that are predicted by a classical theory. He also established, and experiment later confirmed, that quantum mechanics allows this bound to be exceeded. Tsirelson then showed that quantum correlations are themselves bounded. In this talk, I will demonstrate that in a quantum theory defined over galois fields, as  opposed to Hilbert spaces, there exist states for which Tsirelson's bound is exceeded.  

I will review the work on conformal and quasiconformal extensions of global symmetry groups of 5D and 4D supergravity theories that act as their spectrum generating symmetry groups, respectively. The quantization of quasiconformal group actions leads directly to their minimal unitary representations. I will then discuss the connections between quantum spectra of extended 4D supergravity theories with symmetric target spaces and unitary representations of quasiconformal extensions of their global symmetry groups. Finally I will discuss the fundamental role minimal unitary representations play in AdS/CFT dualities.

Several observed anomalies in neutrino oscillation data can be explained by a hypothetical fourth neutrino separated from the three standard neutrinos by a squared mass difference of more than 0.1 eV$^∧2$.

We will discus in detail both the gallium and reactor antineutrino anomalies. We'll first discuss the way to address the anomaly with Nucifer, a very short baseline antineutrino experiment at the Osiris reactor in Saclay. We will then discuss the CeLAND experiment aiming at testing both anomalies on a short time-scale with a 50 kCi antineutrino $\beta$-source ($^∧{144}$Ce) deployed in/next to the KamLAND large low background liquid scintillator detector.

Ground-based gamma-ray astronomy has blossomed in the last decade, and now well over 100 sources have been studied in the TeV range. Gamma rays have wide applicability to astrophysical and cosmological problems, and in this talk I will focus on gamma-ray studies focused on the origin of cosmic rays and indirect detection of dark matter. I will focus on recent results from VERITAS (located in southern Arizona) as well as the status and scientific prospects of the Cherenkov Telescope Array, a next-generation observatory currently in its preparatory phase

In this seminar we will discuss the physics of a lower-energy neutrino interacting with a medium/high-A nuclear target. The interesting aspects of axial-vector nucleus interactions as well as the various nuclear effects that must be considered will be highlighted. The MINERvA experiment, designed to study these interactions, will be described, first results presented and the path forward defined.

Over the past decade, both of the HAPPEX and PREx collaborations have carried out various high-precision polarized elastic electron scattering experiments to explore the nuclear structure, the nucleon form factor and the weak charge of the electron through the technique of the parity-violating asymmetry measurement with limited theoretical uncertainties. Likewise, neutrino-nucleon scattering experiments can provide complementary measurements of Moller, HAPPEX and PREx. In my talk, I will give an overview of electroweak scattering experiments used to study important issues as listed above at low energy. In addition, the first electroweak observation of neutron radii of Lead and its implications for nuclear structure and astrophysics will be discussed in great details.
Host: Camillo Mariani

Host: Camillo Mariani

Double Chooz is a reactor experiment designed to observe the signature of neutrino oscillations driven by the leptonic mixing angle Θ₁₃. In the past, similar, single detector experiments put tight constraints on Θ₁₃ pointing towards a small, or even exactly zero, Θ₁₃ scenario. Double Chooz is a second generation project that utilizes two identical detectors to reduce the dominant reactor systematics and unveil the oscillation patterns driven by Θ₁₃ in the atmospheric square-mass splitting, Δm²_atm.

Double Chooz has started stable data taking with a single, far detector since April 2011. In this seminar we shall give a detailed overview of the concept and the status of the experiment. Emphasis will be given on a measurement of Θ₁₃ based on neutron captures on hydrogen. Finally, perspectives and next steps of this quest will also be reviewed.

Liquid argon time projection chambers (LArTPCs) are an exciting new technology for neutrino detectors. This technology provides excellent position resolution that rivals bubble chamber images, but in a digital format. The striking advantage of liquid argon time projection chambers for neutrino physics is the ability to distinguish between electrons, produced in charged current interactions, and gammas, produced by the decay of neutral pions created in neutral current interactions, with high efficiency. This talk will outline the Fermilab R&D program aimed toward development of a multi-kiloton scale detector for long baseline neutrino physics. Results from the various aspects of the program will be presented, as well as the status of future experiments that will use LArTPCs.
Host: Camillo Mariani

Host: Camillo Mariani

There are about 2000 pulsars known, and while all of them as neutron stars are fascinating objects, the best and most exciting science comes from a very small percentage (~1%) of exotic objects, most of which are millisecond pulsars (MSPs). These systems are notoriously hard to detect, yet their numbers have more than doubled in the past 5-6 years via surveys using the world's largest radio telescopes and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Timing observations of these new MSPs as well as much improved monitoring of previously known MSPs are providing a wealth of science. In this talk I will discuss why pulsar observations are in the middle of a renaissance period, touch on some of the astrophysics they are providing, as well as two important bits of basic physics: the nature of matter at supra-nuclear densities (including the recent accurate measurement of a two Solar mass neutron star), and the direct detection of gravitational waves (e.g. NANOGrav) likely within the next decade. Host:Nahum Arav

The primary goals of present and forthcoming neutrino beam experiments are to establish whether there is CP violation in the leptonic sector and to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy. The large value of $\theta_{13}$ recently discovered has opened the possibility to determine the mass hierarchy in the near future, but the situation is very different for CP violation. I will give a general overview of the physics reach of the main neutrino facilities proposed in the literature for these two observables. Eventually, a precise measurement of the CP-violating phase $\delta$ will also be desirable at any neutrino beam experiment. I will also discuss what are the main factors that will limit the achievable precision for this parameter.

The production of neutrons and radionuclides by cosmogenic secondaries is poorly understood at medium depth overburdens (a few 100 m.w.e.). The Watchman collaboration has undertaken a series of measurements at the Kimballton Underground Research Facility (KURF) to characterize these cosmogenically induced backgrounds. Radionuclide production will be measured using a shielded one ton Gd-H2O detector at ~350 m.w.e. depth, while fast neutrons will be measured as a function of depth using a mobile neutron multiplicity spectrometer (a detector comprised of lead sandwiched between plastic scintillator Gd doped paint detectors). Understanding these backgrounds is essential to the designing of future moderate depth large scale (100+ kiloton) Cherenkov and scintillation detectors, and to determining the feasibility of remote detection and monitoring of small rectors.

The nature of the neutrino and the scale of its absolute mass are two of the pressing fundamental questions in particle physics. Searches for neutrinoless double beta decay (0nuDBD) is the only known practical way to determine whether the neutrinos are Dirac or Majorana fermions. Observation of 0nuDBD would be an unambiguous sign of physics beyond the Standard Model, would signal that the lepton number is not a conserved quantity, and could indicate the absolute scale of the neutrino masses. Several experiments currently underway or in construction phase are searching for 0nuDBD with a neutrino mass sensitivity in the so-called inverted or degenerate mass hierarchy ranges. I will discuss the high-resolution bolometric experiments, and in particular CUORE, which will search for 0nuDBD in Te-130. I will also discuss prospects for improving the sensitivity of the current experiments to the 10-20 meV range, which would explore the entire inverted hierarchy region.
Host:Camillo Mariani