Events at Physics |
Events on Tuesday, January 20th, 2015
- Chaos & Complex Systems Seminar
- The passenger pigeon: Why it went extinct, and can we resurrect it?
- Time: 12:05 pm - 1:00 pm
- Place: 4274 Chamberlin (refreshments will be served)
- Speaker: Stan Temple, Nelson Institute
- Abstract: The passenger pigeon declined from billions to none in the span of 50 years. Stan Temple analyses how this incredible collapse could have happened. And now, 100 years after the species' extinction, advances in biotechnology have led to visions of resurrecting the species. Could we? Should we?
- Host: Clint Sprott
- NPAC (Nuclear/Particle/Astro/Cosmo) Forum
- Faculty Candidate Seminar
- The LUX and LZ Dark Matter Experiments
- Time: 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
- Place: 4274 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Kevin O'Sullivan, Yale
- Abstract: Evidence from galactic rotation curves, gravitational lensing, the cosmic microwave background, and other cosmological studies point to the existence of exotic non-luminous matter, referred to as dark matter. In spite of the strong indirect evidence for the existence of dark matter, it's composition remains unknown. One of the most promising putative dark matter candidates are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) which would be observable through their scatters off ordinary matter. The Large Underground Xenon Experiment (LUX) searches for WIMPs using a large, two-phase Xenon detector operating at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF). The first science run of LUX consisted of 85.3 live days with 118 kg of fiducial mass. A pro file-likelihood analysis of the data shows consistency with the background-only hypothesis, allowing a 90% confidence limit to be set on the spin-independent WIMP-nucleon elastic scattering with an upper limit on the cross section of 7.6x10^46 cm^2 at a WIMP mass of 33 GeV. LUX is continuing to take data and is working on a low-threshold analysis to search for light WIMPs (< 6 GeV in mass). Concurrently design work is ongoing for the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) project which will be two orders of magnitude more sensitive than LUX.
- Host: Dasu