Conveners
February 18 Afternoon Session: Neutrinos
- Erica Caden (SNOLAB)
February 18 Afternoon Session: Nuclear Physics 1
- Jens Dilling (TRIUMF)
Ever since the first measurements were made of these ghostly particles, neutrinos have been a constant fascination for physicists due to their unusual properties. One such peculiarity is that neutrinos can seemingly change flavours as they propagate — a phenomenon known as neutrino oscillation. The oscillation probabilities are determined by a set of fundamental parameters in the Standard...
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...
Bound-state $\beta$-decay ($\beta_b^-$-decay) is a radically transformative decay mode that can change the stability of a nucleus and generate temperature- and density-dependent decay rates. In this decay mode the $\beta$-electron is created directly in a bound atomic orbital of the daughter nucleus instead of being emitted into the continuum, so the decay channel is only significant in almost...
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...
