NPAC (Nuclear/Particle/Astro/Cosmo) Forums |
Organized by: Prof. Lu Lu
Events During the Week of February 2nd through February 9th, 2014
Monday, February 3rd, 2014
- No events scheduled
Tuesday, February 4th, 2014
- No events scheduled
Wednesday, February 5th, 2014
- No events scheduled
Thursday, February 6th, 2014
- Searching for Q-balls with the High Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory
- Time: 2:30 pm
- Place: 4274 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Peter Karn, UC Irvine
- Abstract: The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory is a gamma-ray experiment currently under construction at Sierra Negra in Mexico. When complete it will consist of a 22,000 square meter array of 300 water Cherenkov detectors. Although HAWC is designed to study gamma rays from galactic and extra-galactic sources, the large volume of instrumented water (each tank holds ~188,000 liters) gives the opportunity to search for rare objects. One such target is the Q-ball, a very massive, subrelativistic particle that can have a large baryon number and can be stable since their creation in the early universe. If stable, Q-balls would make up some of the dark matter of the universe, but their large mass means their flux is very low. HAWC has a flexible data acquisition system which, with a dedicated trigger algorithm for non-relativistic species, allows a search for Q-balls traversing the detector. The Q-ball trigger, simulation, and analysis will be presented.
- Host: Vandenbroucke
Friday, February 7th, 2014
- No events scheduled