Staff

WIDG Seminar: Zachary Sweger, UC Davis, "How to Measure a QCD Critical Point"

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.

Kimball Smith Series: The Science and Ethics of Autonomous Warfare

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).

WIDG Seminar: Xiran Bai, Yale, "Expanding the mass range for axion searches through quantum measurement and cavity innovation with HAYSTAC experiment."

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.

WIDG Seminar: Bianka Meçaj, Yale, "Jet Substructure with Energy Correlators"

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.

NPA Seminar: Seb Jones, UCL, "The QTNM collaboration: a project for absolute neutrino mass measurement"

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.

NPA Seminar: Rachel Carr, USNA, "Possibilities for Neutrinos in Nuclear Security"

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.

NPA Seminar: Julieta Gruszko, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, "New Results from LEGEND-200"

The search for neutrinoless double-beta decay is currently one of the most compelling challenges in physics, with the potential to reveal the origin of the neutrino’s mass, demonstrate lepton number violation, and provide hints of the mechanism behind the matter anti-matter asymmetry we observe in our universe. Detecting this ultra-rare process, however, requires us to build very large detectors with very low background rates. The LEGEND experiment searches for the neutrinoless double-beta decay of Ge-76 with hundreds of kilograms of detectors.

Spring 2024 EHS Orientation for Wright Lab Shops

Wright Lab will host two, identical 1-hour Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) Shop Orientations on Friday, January 26 at 11:30 a.m. and Tuesday, January 30 at 3:00 p.m. The EHS shop orientation is offered each semester and is required to be taken once by anyone who would like to gain access and make use of the research and teaching shops at Wright Lab.

For more information on the shop facilities at Wright Lab see:
https://wlab.yale.edu/facilities

Spring 2024 EHS Orientation for Wright Lab Shops

Wright Lab will host two, identical 1-hour Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) Shop Orientations on Friday, January 26 at 11:30 a.m. and Tuesday, January 30 at 3:00 p.m. The EHS shop orientation is offered each semester and is required to be taken once by anyone who would like to gain access and make use of the research and teaching shops at Wright Lab.

For more information on the shop facilities at Wright Lab see:
https://wlab.yale.edu/facilities

NPA Seminar: Nicole Lewis, Rice University, "Search for baryon number carrier in photonuclear processes and heavy-ion collisions at STAR"

Baryon number is a strictly conserved quantum number. It is conventionally assumed to be divided equally among the three valence quarks inside each baryon, but this has never been verified experimentally. An alternative model is the baryon junction: a Y-shaped configuration of nonperturbative gluons that is connected to all three valence quarks and carries the baryon number. In this talk we will present two measurements from the STAR experiment which are sensitive the baryon number carrier.

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