Register below for a lecture by Richard Rhodes, historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” Light dinner will be provided. Yale community members of all disciplines and levels of expertise are encouraged to attend.
Co-sponsors: Physics Department, History Department.
Partners: Wright Laboratory, Political Science Department.
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Abstract
Built by the US government to house the Hanford nuclear site workers who manufactured weapons-grade plutonium for the Manhattan Project, Richland, Washington is proud of its heritage as a nuclear company town and proud of the atomic bomb it helped create. RICHLAND offers a prismatic, placemaking portrait of a community staking its identity and future on its nuclear origin story, presenting a timely examination of the habits of thought that normalize the extraordinary violence of the past.
On average, during Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), 30-50 simultaneous vertices yielding charged and neutral showers, otherwise known as pileup, were recorded per event. This number is expected to only increase at the High Luminosity LHC with predicted values as high as 200. As such, pileup presents a salient problem that, if not checked, hinders the search for new physics as well as Standard Model precision measurements such as jet energy, jet substructure, missing momentum, and lepton isolation.
Scientists confirmed the existence of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) in heavy ion collisions in the early 2000s. One of the earliest theorized signatures for QGP is the enhancement of particles containing strange quarks. In the last decade, results from proton-heavy ion collisions have generated significant discussion about the initial conditions needed to generate a QGP.
For over two decades, researchers at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have mapped the phase diagram of QCD matter. Signatures of a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) phase created in high-energy Au+Au collisions have been observed, and the evolution of these QGP signatures tracked with varying collision energy. Yet one of the large unanswered questions of the RHIC experimental program is whether there is a critical point in the QCD phase diagram, as many models predict there should be.
Join us for a moderated panel followed by small group discussions on the topic of autonomy and artificial intelligence in warfare. The panel will feature Ian Abraham (Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science at Yale and leader of the Intelligent Autonomy Lab) and Michael Butera (Policy Advisor in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at the U.S. Department of State).
Axion is a well-motivated hypothetical particle originally proposed to solve the Strong CP problem in quantum chromodynamics (QCD), and sufficiently light axion may also be a dark matter candidate. The Haloscope At Yale Sensitive To Axion CDM (HAYSTAC) experiment is actively searching for axion cold dark matter using a resonant microwave cavity and quantum squeezed state receiver (SSR). With axion mass and coupling strength unknown, a crucial metric is the scanning rate across its parameter space. Advancements in SSR have led to a doubling of this scanning rate.
Many New Physics searches and QCD precision measurements at particle colliders involve the study of jet substructure for final state hadrons. Recently it has been understood that measuring correlation functions of energy flow operators inside a jet can be a very powerful tool for phenomenology, which naturally stems from first principles of quantum field theory. In this talk I will present a bridge between the vast theoretical progress made to understand the energy correlators from the field theory perspective and their practical implementation into the real world of hadron colliders.
The observation of neutrino oscillations provides proof of non-zero neutrino masses, something which was not predicted in the minimal Standard Model. However, these same neutrino oscillation experiments do not provide information on the absolute scale of the neutrino masses, which remain unknown. The neutrino masses are most directly accessed through those experiments which measure the shape of the beta-decay energy spectrum.
The potential for neutrinos as a nuclear security tool has been recognized for nearly 70 years – well before these weakly interacting particles were even detected. As an unshieldable emission from fission products, neutrinos are powerful messengers about the inner workings of reactors, nuclear explosions, submarines, and spent fuel. The flip side of that power is a serious practical weakness: as particle physicists have long known, capturing neutrino signals requires complex and often very large detectors.
