Tuesday, January 22nd, 10:30am

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has been designed to achieve the unprecedented luminosity of 10 34 cm -2 s -1 . Recently, a 10-fold luminosity upgrade has been proposed (SuperLHC). To exploit the physics potential of the upgraded LHC, an efficient tracking down to a few centimeters from the interaction point will be required, and Semiconductor detectors seem the best option as tracking sensors.

The CERN RD50 collaboration ''Development of Radiation Hard Semiconductor Devices for Very High Luminosity Colliders'' started in 2002 with the aim to develop new reliable detector technologies for the SuperLHC. Three main research lines have been identified: the understanding of the microscopic defects causing the degradation of the irradiated detectors, search for semiconductor materials with increased radiation-hardness, and variations in the sensor geometry.

Thursday, January 31st, 12:00pm

This will be an informal discussion about what low energy
physics, including mixing measurements, hint at for the LHC.  We will follow the
lead of the work of Yossi Nir on this topic as a guide.

Tuesday, February 5th, 10:30am

One of the major open questions in physics is the nature of the dark matter which makes up approximately 25% of the energy density of the universe. One potential candidate is the axion, an extremely light (micro-eV to meV) pseudoscalar boson postulated to exist as a solution to problems in strong nuclear physics. Large amounts of relic axions could have been generated after the Big Bang and would thus make a natural dark matter candidate. Since the mid-1990s the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment (ADMX) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has been searching for these particles by utilizing their predicted interaction with photons via the Primakoff effect (two-photon coupling). Here we describe the ADMX detector and its results before going into detail on the progress of our current system upgrade, which will provide us with unprecedented sensitivity to these hypothetical particles.

Please Note Special Location: ISB 221

Tuesday, February 12th, 10:30am

Building on the success of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, SDSS-III
is a proposed third-generation, all-spectroscopic survey.  BOSS is
the flagship project of SDSS-III, awarded all the dark and grey
observing time for five years (2009- 2014).  BOSS will cover 10,000
square degrees and employ two different techniques to precisely
measure the standard ruler provided by baron acoustic oscillation
(BAO) 'ripples' in the large scale matter distribution.  I will give
an overview of SDSS-III, and describe the BOSS scientific goals and
project status.

Tuesday, February 19th, 10:30am

"Astrophysical Probe of New Physics: Cosmological Dark Matter and Anisotropy"

(1) Detection of charged massive particles produced by atmospheric and
astrophysical neutrinos at neutrino telescopes;
(2) Effect of nonlinear evolution of primordial anisotropy in the Universe.

All these are related to currently running or upcoming projects such as
(1) IceCube, (2) 2dF/SDSS galaxy surveys, respectively.

Tuesday, March 11th, 10:30am

Results from the solar, atmospheric, accelerator, and reactor neutrino
experiments have provided compelling evidence for neutrino mass and
oscillation.  Two of the three neutrino mixing angles have now been
measured.  The last mixing angle (Theta_13), which describes the coupling
of the electron neutrino flavor to the 3rd mass eigenstate, is still unknown.
This angle is a fundamental parameter of the Standard Model and it is
critical to future CP violation searches in the neutrino sector.  In this
talk, I will report on the status of the Dayabay neutrino oscillation
experiment currently under construction in southern China.  Dayabay is a
reactor based neutrino oscillation experiment designed to measure
sin 2 (2*Theta_13) to better than 0.01.  With the expected sensitivity of
Dayabay, the end to the quest for the last mixing angle may be within sight.