Yale Postdoctoral Trainees

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 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.

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

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.

In 1970, Allan Sandage famously described Cosmology as “A search for two numbers”. In the half-century since that description of the field was penned, as Stage III cosmic surveys come to an end and Stage-IV surveys begin taking data, the field finds itself having measured the six parameters of the concordance ΛCDM model at nearly 1% precision. However, different experiments now report different values for two of these parameters – namely the Hubble Constant and the variance of dark matter density fluctuations, S(igma) 8 – at varying levels of significance.