Simple hidden sector theories can give rise to interacting dark matter involving multiple particle species and long-range interactions, such as atomic dark matter. These scenarios are highly plausible in their own right, but can be particularly motivated by modern solutions to the Hierarchy Problem such as the Twin Higgs. These dark matter models feature dissipative dynamics and bound state...
Several models that provide solutions to the Standard Model's open problems allow for the possibility of long lived particles (LLPs) with lifetimes, in some cases, in excess of $10^{3}$ seconds. It is proposed that charged LLPs produced at the Large Hadron Collider could interact with the ATLAS detector, eventually coming to rest and decaying. Other LLPs, such as neutral particles, may also...
We analyzed diphoton($e^+e^-$) and dielectron($\gamma\gamma$) invariant mass spectrums in ATLAS to search for periodic resonance signals which are the decay products of clockwork gravitons predicted by the clockwork model. The clockwork model attempts to answer the hierarchy problem through a novel particle-generating mechanism. The name clockwork follows from the mechanics of obtaining a...
Distinguishing between signal events and background events is the main issue in the integrating measurments of nuclear physics and particle physics experiments. Signal corrections can be accomplished either theoretically or experimentally. In the experimental approaches, a set of detectors called background detectors is implemented. In background detectors, the majority of particles generating...
The US-based future Electron-Ion Collider is a novel tool to address some of the unexplained physics of nucleons, including how their constituents contribute to their properties like spin, mass, etc., by colliding highly polarized electron beams with polarized beams of protons or ions. The high-energy interactions between the electrons and protons help in understanding the internal structure...
I will give an overview of pseudo-Dirac dark matter, a scenario where a small Majorana mass splits charged Dirac dark matter into two nearly degenerate states. A longtime favourite of model-builders, this dark matter candidate has a rich phenomenology that still has yet to be fully characterized. I will discuss a few mechanisms for producing this kind of dark matter in the early universe, and...
There is strong evidence for the existence of Dark Matter. One possible form of Dark Matter is strongly self-interacting Dark Matter, or Strongly Interacting Massive Particles (SIMP), modelled after Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). It should also be noted that, to date, no direct detection of any kind of dark matter has been made. Direct detection of dark matter at accelerators is a high priority...
Many particle and rare-event search detectors use liquid scintillators as the detection method. A popular candidate for scintillation fluids are noble elements such as Liquid Argon (LAr). LAr detectors typically store their scintillators inside an acrylic vessel, which can be coated with various materials. A common coating is 1,1,4,4-tetraphenyl-1,3-butadiene (TPB) which is a wavelength...
The PICO collaboration aims to use superheated bubble chambers for the direct detection of dark matter, particularly in the spin-dependent WIMP-proton regime. PICO-40L is the current generation dark matter detector that is currently in the final stages of construction 2km underground at SNOLAB. It will be anticipating first commissioning results and early physics results early next year. The...
The NEWS-G experiment searches for low-mass dark matter candidates at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Ontario. The direct dark matter search is performed using a spherical proportional counter (SPC) filled with light atomic mass gases. NEWS-G3 is a proposed experiment that employs the same technology as the NEWS-G experiment to search for coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEνNS) at a nuclear...
Many important questions in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) remain unanswered, despite decades of investigation. For example, we cannot adequately explain how the fundamental properties (mass, spin) of objects such as the proton and neutron emerge from their constituent quarks and gluons. Interactions and structure in nuclear matter are intricately connected, the observed properties of composite...
The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) is a new US$2 billion high-luminosity accelerator that is expected to be operational at Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA at the beginning of the next decade. One of the main goals of the EIC is to understand the origin of hadronic mass, this is the majority of visible mass (>99%) in the universe. From the little that we understand, we know that the mass of...
The Measurement Of a Lepton Lepton Electroweak Reaction (MOLLER) experiment anticipates new dynamics beyond the standard model. The measurements are acquired by the scattering of longitudinally polarized electrons off the unpolarized electrons using a set of detectors in Hall A at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) in Newport News, Virginia USA. In the present...
In perturbative QCD, processes involving quark scattering provide the simplest way of studying non-Abelian scattering amplitudes. To that end, in this talk I will discuss our calculation for the Form Factor of the Higgs boson production via light quark mediated Gluon Fusion process in the high energy/small quark mass limit, where the leading contribution comes in the form of large double...
Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS) is described by an exchange of virtual photons or, at high energies, the $Z^0$. The distinctive characteristic of DIS in contrast to many processes (such as $pp$ at the LHC or $pA$ at the RHIC) is that the kinematics are precisely computable from the leptonic (and hadronic) final state at all orders. DIS reconstruction has a strong dependence on the collision...
The SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment is a next-generation direct detection dark matter search experiment with an anticipated world-leading sensitivity to particles with masses $\leq 10 \text{ GeV/c}^2$. The experiment is currently under construction at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Ontario. The unique facility, located 2 km underground, offers abundant shielding against cosmic rays. The SuperCDMS experiment...
As part of the Dark Matter search by SuperCDMS at SNOLAB, HVeV detectors are used to provide a mechanism of detecting eV-scale energies. HVeV detectors are typically made of high-purity silicon operating with a high bias voltage at sub-K temperatures. An excitation to the silicon generates electron/hole pairs that drift due to the bias voltage. The phonons produced by the drift are expected to...
In the Fall of 2019, the NEWS-G experiment used its latest detector, a 140 cm diameter Spherical Proportional Counter (SPC) to search for low-mass dark matter at the Laboratoire souterrain de Modane (LSM), in France. Having the sphere filled with pure methane, hydrogen was used as the target to produce new limits on the spin-dependent cross-section around masses of 1 GeV.
This talk will...
In this talk I will present preliminary results regarding the application of machine learning techniques for noise removal on signals from spherical proportional counters (SPCs) with the NEWS-G experiment. In SPC detectors, a primary ionization, created by a particle interacting with the gas, drifts towards a central anode. When ions approach the anode, the electric field becomes strong enough...
The Multi-Ion Reflection Apparatus for Collinear Laser Spectroscopy (MIRACLS) is a novel approach in performing high-resolution collinear laser spectroscopy (CLS) in a multi-reflection time-of-flight (MR-ToF) device. By trapping a 30-keV ion beam in-between the MR-ToF’s electrostatic mirrors and revolving it around a few thousand times through an optical detection region (ODR), significant...
As the heaviest known fundamental particle, the top quark plays a special role in many theories of new physics beyond the Standard Model. Reconstruction of top anti-top pair production to the best possible resolution is therefore crucial to enhancing our sensitivity to Beyond Standard Model effects in precision measurements and searches at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), from improved mass...
ALPHA-g has completed a successful run in 2022 in the pursuit of measuring the gravitational mass of antihydrogen. This apparatus was designed to test whether antimatter follows Einstein’s Weak Equivalence Principle (WEP), where the acceleration due to gravity that a body experiences is independent of its structure or composition. A measurement of the gravitational mass of antimatter has never...
The Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) collaboration uses low energy antiprotons to produce, trap, and study the bound state of an antiproton and positron, antihydrogen. Hydrogen has been studied extensively through history and has many physical properties known to a high precision experimentally and theoretically. Therefore, comparisons between hydrogen and its antimatter equivalent...
It has been known for many years that an electron and its antiparticle, the positron, may together form a metastable hydrogen-like atom, known as positronium or Ps. In 1946, Wheeler speculated that two Ps atoms may combine to form the positronium molecule (Ps$_2$) stable with respect to auto-dissociation. In 2007, the existence of Ps$_2$ was confirmed experimentally by David Cassidy and? Allen...
Nuclei away from the line of stability have been found to demonstrate behavior that is inconsistent with the traditional magic numbers of the spherical shell model. This has led to the concept of the evolution of nuclear shell structure in exotic nuclei, and the neutron-rich calcium isotopes are a key testing ground of these theories; there have been conflicting results from various...
The term ‘island of inversion’ is used to refer to a region of the nuclear landscape in which deformed intruder configurations dominate nuclear ground states over the spherical configurations naively expected from the shell model. Theoretical models of the inversion mechanism can be tested through detailed studies of the nuclear structure of transitional nuclei, in which the normal and...
Clustering in nuclei provides an alternative description to their nuclear structure in addition to the Nuclear Shell Model. Although alpha ($^4$He nucleus) clusters are widely accepted to be essential to the understanding of the structure of light nuclei, such as the Hoyle state in $^{12}$C, it was experimentally observed in heavy nuclei only recently in $^{212}$Po. The observation showed that...
Nuclear theories often operate under the assumption that the strong nuclear force is charge independent. As a result, it is expected that mirror nuclei, which are identical under the exchange of total number of protons and neutrons, will have similar nuclear structures when Coulombic contributions are considered. Under the assumption of charge dependence, protons and neutrons are grouped...
Neutron rich Mg isotopes far from stability belong to a region known as the island of inversion where the single particle description of the shell model breaks down, and the predicted configuration of the nuclear states becomes inverted. Nuclei in this region also exhibit collective behaviour in which multiple particle interactions play a significant role in nuclear matrix elements. These...
The nucleus, made up of protons and neutrons, exhibits a shell-like structure consisting of orbitals described by quantum mechanics. This has been demonstrated by extensive experimental observables, which reveal that nuclei possessing specific "magic numbers" of neutrons or protons exhibit particular characteristics well described in the nuclear shell model. The tin isotopes, with a closed...
The nEXO experiment is a proposed neutrinoless double beta decay (0$\nu\beta\beta$) search in the isotope $^{136}$Xe. 0$\nu\beta\beta$ is a lepton number violating process, and a positive observation of this decay mode in any isotope would be a direct observation of physics beyond the standard model. Anticipated to be located 2 km underground at SNOLAB, nEXO aims to discover the Majorana...
Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) are an excellent solid-state photon detection technology that is becoming increasingly popular in the field of particle and medical physics. The features of SiPMs that make them an ideal candidate for photon detection are their compact size, lightweight, high gain, low operating voltage, low dark noise, and insensitivity to the magnetic field. The nEXO...
The SNO+ experiment is a multi-phase neutrino detector located at the SNOLAB underground physics laboratory in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. Currently, the 12 m diameter acrylic vessel (AV) is filled with 780 tonnes of the liquid scintillator, linear alkylbenzene (LAB), doped with the fluor 2,5-diphenyloxazole (PPO) to a concentration of 2.2 g/L. The detector is viewed by approximately 9400...
We present results of an analysis studying neutrino-nucleon interactions in the energy range between ~100 GeV - 1 TeV by measuring the inelasticity of these interactions with IceCube DeepCore. IceCube is a Cherenkov neutrino telescope consisting of an optical sensor array placed in ice 1.5 - 2.5 km below the geographic South Pole and covering a volume of roughly 1 km3. DeepCore is a densely...
Precision mass measurements of neutron-deficient $fp$-shell nuclei near N=Z are of interest to the nuclear physics community because they are relevant to several research areas. First is that these nuclei are situated along the reaction path of the rapid proton capture process (rp-process) which powers type I X-ray bursts. Precision mass values are required for the calculation of astrophysical...
Nuclear pairing, i.e., the tendency of nucleons to form pairs, has important consequences to the physics of neutron star crusts and heavy nuclei. The usual pairing found in nuclei happens between identical nucleons and in singlet states, while recent investigations have shown that certain heavy nuclei might exhibit triplet and mixed-spin pairing correlations in their ground states. In this...
The precision measurements of neutrino oscillation parameters and neutrino-nucleus scattering and also unprecedented sensitivity to physics beyond the Standard Model are the goals of the next generation of long-baseline neutrino experiments. To achieve this high precision and sensitivity, these experiments need a reduction of the uncertainties in neutrino flux calculations. New measurements of...
A high-precision half-life measurement for the radioactive isotope, 26Na, was performed at TRIUMF’s Isotope Separator and Accelerator (ISAC) facility. This is the first experimental test of the high-efficiency Gamma-Ray Infrastructure for Fundamental Investigations of Nuclei (GRIFFIN) spectrometer for performing high precision (± 0.05% or better) half-life measurements [1]. In this talk, I...
The development of the GPD formalism in the last 25 years is a groundbreaking advance in our understanding of the structure of the nucleon. Unifying the concepts of parton distributions and of hadronic form factors, they contain a wealth of new information about how quarks and gluons make up hadrons. For example, GPDs correlate different parton configurations in the hadron at the quantum...
One of the foremost goals of nuclear physics is to provide an understanding of how nuclei are assembled from the basic constituent building blocks of protons and neutrons. Preceding studies have attempted to achieve this by observing the excitation's of nuclei under fine-tuned experimental conditions with the most advanced detectors available on the planet. Nevertheless, this initiative...
Neutrons are subatomic particles with no net electric charge, which means that they generally can penetrate deeper into matter than other subatomic particles. The interaction between neutrons and matter can be used to gather information about bulk characteristics of materials by evaluating the scattered neutrons. This opens a whole assortment of possible physics knowledge that can be acquired...
Potassium-40 ($^{40}$K) is a naturally-occurring, radioactive isotope impacting understanding of nuclear structure, geological ages spanning timescales as old as the Earth, and rare-event searches including those for dark matter and neutrinoless double-beta decay. The long-lived $^{40}$K radionuclide undergoes electron capture decays to either the excited or ground state of its Ar daughter, of...
Recent neutron-star merger observations have provided r-process abundance constraints, which has led to significant attention towards additional neutron-capture processes such as the i-process and n-process. Working between the rates and environmental neutron densities of the r-process and s-process, their reaction pathways and abundance contributions are not yet fully characterized. Operating...
One of the challenges faced while studying the nuclear many-body problem is the nature of the nucleon-nucleon interaction. The full details are described by the theory of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), but for realistic calculations approximate models must be used. Historically these have been phenomenological potentials fit to experimental data. However, in recent decades, models for the...
As one moves away from stable isotopes and deeper into the neutron-rich region, the likelihood of β-delayed neutron (βn) emission decay increases. The ability to understand the neutron emission probabilities and the neutron energy spectrum can reveal highly sensitive detail of the nuclear structure that a conventional β-decay study using only γ-ray detection cannot. We propose to build the...
The response of the proton to elastic scattering events has long been known to be described via two functions of the squared momentum transfer $Q^2$: the Sachs electric and magnetic form factors $G_E\left(Q^2\right)$ and $G_M\left(Q^2\right)$, respectively. To understand this elastic structure of the proton there are two main observables which constrain the form factors: cross section data...
I will present a constraint on the sterile-neutrino dark matter through neutrino self-interaction inside a core-collapse supernova. The environment inside a core-collapse supernova has similar features as the early universe era where the sterile-neutrino dark matter is dominantly produced. I will start by showing how a massive scalar mediated neutrino self-interaction can affect the cooling...
I present a new, open-source, pure Python program, MUTE (MUon inTensity codE) (A. Fedynitch, W. Woodley, M.-C. Piro 2022 ApJ 928 27). MUTE combines the state-of-the-art codes MCEq (Matrix Cascade Equation) and PROPOSAL (PRopagator with Optimal Precision and Optimised Speed for All Leptons) to compute cosmic ray cascades in the atmosphere and the propagation of muons through matter in separate...
Bubble chambers using fluorocarbons or liquid noble gases are promising technologies for detecting low-energy nuclear recoils from weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), a potential candidate for dark matter. In this study, we used molecular dynamics simulations to determine the energy threshold in superheated liquids and Monte Carlo simulations with SRIM to obtain the bubble nucleation...
Situated at the low-energy tail of the Giant Dipole Resonance (GDR), which is described as an out-of-phase oscillation between protons (Z) and neutrons (N), neutron-rich nuclei exhibit a small resonance like structure of additional electric dipole strength which has been denoted as the Pygmy Dipole Resonance (PDR). The PDR is interpreted, in a geometric picture, as an out-of-phase oscillation...
Radon is a radioactive gas that arises from the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium minerals. It emerges from the ground and can enter homes, where it can decay and attach to dust particles, both of which can be inhaled. The alpha emissions from radon decay can cause DNA damage in lung tissue, increasing the risk of lung cancer [1,2]. Assessing radon exposure is important as it is the...
Nuclear structure properties of many isotopes in the neutron-rich region are still unknown. Detection systems that focus on this region are an important part of nuclear physics studies. At TRIUMF, the gamma-decay spectroscopy GRIFFIN facility, and its ancillary detectors, such as the neutron-tagging DESCANT detector, allows the study of many of these nuclei. From these studies, we can learn...
