Undergraduate

NPA Seminar, Ejiro Umaka, BNL, "sPHENIX Experiment at RHIC – Physics Program and Status”

sPHENIX is a new Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) detector under construction at Brookhaven National Laboratory required to complete RHIC’s scientific mission of probing the inner workings of Quark-Gluon Plasma. For that reason, sPHENIX will make precision measurements of jets, heavy flavor, and upsilon production. These measurements are possible due to the large hermetic acceptance, huge data rate, hadronic calorimetry, precision tracking of the sPHENIX detector.
This talk will discuss sPHENIX readiness for operations, its physics program, and construction status.

NPA Seminar, Kong Tu, Brookhaven, “Shining light through nuclear matter to see why they matter - a scientific journey to understand the visible world”

Understanding what our material world is made of has been an ultimate question for humankind for as long as our existence. Yet modern science and technology have enabled us to “see” objects at vastly different scales, from stars in distant galaxies to atomic particles, the fundamental origin of these matter and their strong interactions are far from understood. One of the most intriguing questions, the color confinement, is of particular interest, where quarks and gluons are forever clumped in the form of hadrons.

NPA Seminar, Sookhyun Lee, University of Michigan, “Probing proton structure and particle formation in high-energy particle collisions”

The Standard Model of particle physics describes fundamental forces in the universe – electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions. The strong interactions between quarks and gluons via color charges is described by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). High-energy particle accelerators enable precision studies of the Standard Model and beyond and, in particular, answering fundamental open questions in QCD, concerning the processes underlying complex particle formation and the nature of emergent QCD. Hadrons are composite color neutral states that comprise much of the visible world around us.

NPA Seminar, Alice Ohlson, Lund University, “Exploring the phase diagram of nuclear matter with heavy-ion collisions”

In ultrarelativistic collisions of heavy nuclei, such as those which take place in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the resulting state is so hot and dense that normal matter melts into its constituent parts, and quarks and gluons are no longer confined into hadrons. Known as the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), this matter occupies the high-temperature and high-density regime of the phase diagram of quantum chromodynamics (QCD).

NPA Seminar, Austin Baty, Rice University, “Jets and trillion-degree matter: studying QCD at multiple scales”

The theory of the strong nuclear force - Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) - describes the interactions between fundamental particles known as quarks and gluons. In this talk, I will explain how the strong nature of the QCD interaction results in phenomena having unique and intriguing properties. One such example is the creation of a hot, dense form of matter that behaves like a ‘perfect liquid,’ known as the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), in collisions of high-energy nuclei. Another QCD phenomenon is the fragmentation of high-momentum quarks and gluons into streams of particles known as jets.

NPA Seminar, Laura Havener, Yale, “Exploring QCD with quarks, gluons, and the quark-gluon plasma”

The smallest building blocks of matter, quarks and gluons (partons), are usually confined inside protons and neutrons (hadrons). At very high energies and temperatures, the partons become deconfined or “free”, forming a novel state of matter called the Quark-Gluon plasma (QGP). The QGP is produced at high-energy colliders by smashing together heavy ions and is found to be a nearly perfect fluid, but precise knowledge of its intrinsic properties is required. Jets are ideal probes of the QGP.

NPA Seminar: Prakhar Garg, Stony Brook University, “Gaseous detectors for upcoming and future experiments”

Gaseous detectors are one of the most versatile concepts used in a wide range of physics experiments.
In this seminar, I would discuss some of their flavours in nuclear and high energy physics experiments. Particular emphasis will be on Time Projection Chamber for sPHENIX experiment, GEM Trackers for MOLLER experiment, Cylindrical \mu-RWELL for PIONEER Experiment and Generic ongoing R&D plans of GridPix detector for EIC. I would try to incorporate mostly the key features of these detector concepts and what makes them interesting to us.
Host: Helen Caines

Dissertation Defense: London Cooper-Troendle, Yale University, "First Measurement of Inclusive Muon Neutrino Charged Current Triple Differential Cross Section on Argon"

The field of accelerator neutrino experiments is entering an era of precision oscillation measurements where the remaining unknown neutrino measurements will be determined. The upcoming DUNE and Hyper-K experiments aim to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy and degree of Charge-Parity (CP) violation in the neutrino sector, providing potential insight on the matter-antimatter imbalance observed in the universe. However, these experiments require highly accurate measurements, and neutrino cross section modeling uncertainties may limit their capabilities.

Dissertation Defense: Kaicheng Li, Yale University, "Searching for the Electron Neutrino Anomaly with the MicroBooNE Experiment Using Wire-Cell Reconstruction"

The Micro Booster Neutrino Experiment (MicroBooNE) is a leading large-scale Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) experiment, designed for precision neutrino physics. The main scientific objectives of MicroBooNE include the investigation of the Low Energy Excess (LEE) observed by the MiniBooNE Experiment between 2002-2019 in the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) at Fermilab, the measurements of neutrino-argon interactions, and the research and development of LArTPC technology. This thesis focuses on understanding the MiniBooNE LEE through charged-current electron neutrino interactions.

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