Events at Physics |
Events on Thursday, March 14th, 2019
- NPAC (Nuclear/Particle/Astro/Cosmo) Forum
- Measure what is measurable and make measurable what is not so — Uncover new physics with bosons at the LHC and upgrades of the CMS detector to maximize the discovery potential
- Time: 2:00 pm
- Place: 5280 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Miaoyuan Liu, Fermilab
- Abstract: The Standard Model describes the building blocks of matter and their
interactions. It has been tested extensively with experimental data and
found to be incredibly successful in describing nature. Discovering the
Higgs boson in 2012 at the LHC completed the picture of the SM. The LHC
is at the forefront of directly searching for new physics which is
Beyond-Standard-Model (BSM), and I will discuss searches for
supersymmetric partners of the electroweak bosons, as well as
measurement of an extremely rare process with three WWW bosons as
stringent tests of the SM. I will also discuss the instrumentation which
enables such studies. The discussion includes the recently completed CMS
Phase-1 pixel upgrade, as well as the R&D studies towards solving the
future trigger and computing challenges using innovative machine
learning approaches in future high energy experiments.
- Host: Tulika Bose
- Astronomy Colloquium
- Building a Gravitational Wave Detector with Millisecond Pulsars
- Time: 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
- Place: 4421 Sterling Hall, Coffee and cookies 3:30 PM, Talk begins 3:45 PM
- Speaker: Joseph Swiggum, NANOGrav Postdoctoral Fellow Center for Gravitation, Cosmology, & Astrophysics University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
- Abstract: The Green Bank North Celestial Cap (GBNCC) pulsar survey aims to cover the full sky north of -40 degrees declination at 350 MHz using the Green Bank Telescope. One of the main science goals of the survey is to find new millisecond pulsars (MSPs) and rapidly assess their suitability for inclusion in pulsar timing arrays (PTAs). The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) currently monitors about 75 MSPs with sub-microsecond RMS residuals in an effort to detect low-frequency gravitational waves from merging supermassive black hole binaries. The best way to improve our sensitivity to the stochastic gravitational wave background is to add high-caliber MSPs to PTAs and this is also an essential strategy for long-term characterization of the gravitational wave signal. Over the past two years, ten MSPs have been discovered in the GBNCC pulsar survey. Several have already been added to NANOGrav and released to the International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA) collaboration. I will discuss GBNCC survey sensitivity, search procedures, and assessments of new MSP discoveries for PTA inclusion, as well as how current yields inform our future strategies for gravitational wave detection and signal characterization.
- Host: Robert Benjamin