Faculty

The Hydrogen Intensity Real-time Analysis eXperiment (HIRAX) is a 21cm radio telescope array to be deployed in South Africa. It will consist of 1024 six meter parabolic dishes, and will map much of the southern sky over the course of four years. HIRAX is designed to improve constraints on the dark energy equation of state through measurements of large scale structure at high redshift, and will additionally monitor transients such as fast radio bursts (FRBs) and pulars, as is currently done with CHIME in the Northern Hemisphere.

The physics program of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) has brought a unique insight into the hot and dense QCD matter created in such collisions, the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Jet quenching, a collection of medium-induced modifications of the jets’ internal structure that occur through their development in dense QCD matter, has a unique potential to assess the time structure of the produced medium.

The Standard Model of particle physics provides a remarkably predictive and well-tested theory for describing the interactions of the known elementary particles. However, the observed matter/antimatter asymmetry, the existence of small neutrino masses, and cosmological constraints on dark matter and dark energy point strongly to the existence of fundamental physics beyond the Standard Model. In the past few decades, ultra-low-background liquid xenon time projection chambers (TPCs) have emerged as a powerful experimental technique in the search for low energy signatures of new physics.

Axions emerge naturally from the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) mechanism which addresses the absence of CP violation in QCD; the axions produced through the “vacuum realignment mechanism” are also a good cold dark matter (CDM) candidate. Traditional cavity haloscope experiments such as ADMX and HAYSTAC have focused on the ~1-10 µeV mass range, leaving the theoretically well motivated mass range of ~100 µeV unexplored.

Quantum mechanics is experiencing an experimental and theoretical renaissance. In this talk, we will discuss novel ways to use quantum mechanics and provide several experimental applications of quantum tomography for proton-proton and heavy-ion collision experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. We will discuss application of this model-independent analysis technique for Z bosons, dijets and quarkonia. The first observation of an unexpected correlation of spin and momentum in the experimental data will also be presented.
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