Staff

The Wright Lab community is invited to a weekly meeting on Mondays at 9:30 a.m. in WL-216 to hear about and discuss what is going on at the lab.

Baryon number is a strictly conserved quantum number. It is conventionally assumed to be divided equally among the three valence quarks inside each baryon, but this has never been verified experimentally. An alternative model is the baryon junction: a Y-shaped configuration of nonperturbative gluons that is connected to all three valence quarks and carries the baryon number. In this talk we will present two measurements from the STAR experiment which are sensitive the baryon number carrier.

In 1970, Allan Sandage famously described Cosmology as “A search for two numbers”. In the half-century since that description of the field was penned, as Stage III cosmic surveys come to an end and Stage-IV surveys begin taking data, the field finds itself having measured the six parameters of the concordance ΛCDM model at nearly 1% precision. However, different experiments now report different values for two of these parameters – namely the Hubble Constant and the variance of dark matter density fluctuations, S(igma) 8 – at varying levels of significance.

Ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions produce a hot and dense QCD matter, called Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Unlike in ordinary matter, quarks and gluons are not confined within short distances but can roam freely over distances larger than the hadronic scale in the state of QGP. Understanding this novel state of matter offers a new way to learn how quarks and gluons bind to form stable particles like the proton.

Long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments present some of the most compelling paths toward physics beyond the standard model. Measurement of the leptonic mixing matrix through oscillation and observation of the degree of leptonic CP violation demonstrates a proof of concept for understanding the difference between matter and anti-matter in the observable universe. State of the art experiments like NOvA and T2K are currently performing measurements of neutrino oscillation, but ultimately, will be statistically limited.