Exploring the unknown facets of the visible universe through the lens of rare isotopes
R. Kanungo
TRIUMF, Vancouver, Canada
Visible matter in our universe embody nature’s strong force combining protons and neutrons into complex systems. While much has been understood about the stable nuclei, the rare isotopes approaching the limits of neutron and proton binding bring a wealth of new...
Abstract
The study of exotic nuclei has led to the discovery of new and unexpected characteristics of the nucleus. One of the discoveries is the changes in the shell configuration, causing the well-known magic numbers, i.e. shell closures, to disappear as well as the emergence of new magic numbers. The neutron number $N=32$ is one of the unconventional new shell closures that has been...
Nuclear theories often operate under the assumption that the strong nuclear force is independent of electric charge. As a result, it is expected that exchanging the number of protons with the number of neutrons in a nucleus will produce a mirror nucleus with identical structure after electromagnetic considerations. However, due to the charge dependence of the strong nuclear force, isospin...
The semi-magic $^{120}_{50}$Sn$_{70}$ lies in the neutron mid-shell among the other stable Sn isotopes, where shape coexistence was observed with the signature of deformed 2p-2h bands built on excited $0^+$ states intruding into the yrast band that is built on the spherical ground state. However, the lifetime of the excited $0^+_3$ only has a lower limit of 6 ps in the literature, which...
In this talk, we will cover various topics related to EDI in STEM research taken from literature and resources accessible on the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) websites and many other sources cited in the presentation. We will start by introducing formal definitions of equity, diversity, and inclusion, as well as discussing why EDI is important for...
The reaction rate and subsequent cross section enhancement to the $^7\mathrm{Li}(^1\mathrm{H}, \alpha)\alpha$ reaction was measured in samples of lithium tungstate ($\mathrm{Li}_2\mathrm{WO}_4$), lithium manganate ($\mathrm{LiMn}_2\mathrm{O}_4$), lithium titanate spinel ($\mathrm{Li}_4\mathrm{Ti}_5\mathrm{O}_{12}$), and lithium iron phosphate ($\mathrm{LiFePO}_4$) at lab frame beam energies...
The chemical properties of heavy elements are anticipated to diverge from established periodic trends due to significant relativistic effects. However, experimental investigations in this region remain extremely challenging and necessitate the use of nuclear physics techniques. This is especially true for the late actinides (Z > 100) and superheavy elements (Z > 104), where studies are limited...
The study of nuclear shapes has greatly benefited from the capabilities of the current generation of detector arrays, uncovering different phenomena in different regions of the nuclear chart. Shape coexistence, once thought to be quite rare is now observed to occur throughout the nuclear landscape. An experiment to study the structure of $^{80}$Ge was conducted at TRIUMF, populating excited...
Although the shell model forms the backbone of our understanding of nuclear structure, the breakdown of traditional magic numbers far from stability gives insight into the nature of the underlying nuclear interactions and acts as a tool to test existing models. Islands of inversion (IoI) in the nuclear landscape are characterized by the presence of deformed multi-particle multi-hole (npnh)...
Plastic scintillators are a common type of particle detector that is often used for their fast timing, robustness and cheap cost. Plastic scintillators are commonly used in veto systems since they can be made to large sizes needed for the experiment as well having a variety of dopants added to them to improve the detection of specific particles. As with any scintillator it is important to...
The Measurement Of a Lepton-Lepton Electroweak Reaction (MOLLER)
experiment aims to explore new dynamics beyond the Standard Model. The experiment is placed in Hall A at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) in Newport News, Virginia, USA. The measurements are acquired by the scattering of longitudinally polarized electrons off unpolarized electrons in a liquid hydrogen...
The imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe challenges our understanding of physics. While the Standard Model predicts that matter and antimatter should exist in equal proportions, observations show a matter-dominated universe. To address this, the ALPHA Collaboration conducts precision spectroscopy experiments on antihydrogen, the antimatter counterpart to the hydrogen atom....
The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, though highly successful, is incomplete. It fails to explain phenomena such as matter-antimatter asymmetry and the nature of dark matter (DM). Extensions to the SM, such as the Dark Sector model, introduce new physics, including feebly interacting particles like millicharged particles (mCPs) that may provide insight into these phenomena. The...
It would be interesting to know how a particle could have only a single magnetic north (or south) pole. Dirac showed that magnetic monopoles are compatible with quantum mechanics, relating the fundamental magnetic charge to the smallest electric charge. Magnetic monopoles would restore the broken electric-magnetic duality in Maxwell’s equations and are predicted by various theories aiming to...
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...
The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration is developing novel particle detectors sensitive to low-energy (sub-keV) nuclear recoils by combining existing bubble chamber technology with liquid noble detectors. This approach leverages the insensitivity to electronic recoils characteristic of bubble chambers alongside the scintillation yield from a liquid noble active medium. SBC aims...
The PICO collaboration uses superheated bubble chambers in search of dark matter through direct detection. The PICO-500 experiment is the next generation PICO detector, expected to reach world-leading sensitivity for weakly interacting massive particle (WIMPs) interactions. Building upon the success of previous PICO detectors, this next-generation apparatus will consist of $\sim$250 liters of...
The latest results from the DEAP-3600 experiment will be presented. DEAP-3600 experiment is a direct dark matter search that employs single-phase liquid argon to detect potential dark matter interactions in the universe. Located 2 km underground at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Canada, the experiment uses a spherical acrylic vessel capable of holding 3600 kg of liquid argon. This vessel is monitored by...
The PICO experiment uses bubbles chambers, where the fluid is superheated, to directly look out for the existence of WIMPs dark matter particles. Fluorocarbon material (CF3I or C3F8) is used as an active fluid that allow to study inelastic dark matter-nucleus scattering interaction. This technology is designed in such a way that it has the ability to reject electron-recoil interaction and be...
The detection of dark matter remains a central challenge in particle physics. Liquid argon (LAr) based experiments, like DEAP-3600, must understand potential background signals mimicking dark matter in order to achieve maximum sensitivity. Argon-1, a modular LAr detector at Carleton University utilizing silicon photomultipliers, provides a platform to study key background sources, aiding not...
What is the nature of dark matter? This fundamental question, which seeks to uncover its properties, composition, and origin, remains one of the greatest enigmas in modern physics. Despite direct detection experiments achieving unprecedented sensitivity — some even capable of detecting solar neutrinos — the mystery persists. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) have long been a leading...
The NEWS-G (New Experiments With Spheres-Gas) uses a spherical proportional counter to search for low-mass dark matter at the SNOLAB underground laboratory. Radon, a significant source of contamination for the NEWS-G detector and other rare event search detectors, requires effective mitigation strategies. This talk presents the performance of a novel radon trap using silver zeolite, which...
The TRIUMF electron linear accelerator (e-Linac) will be the second driver beam for nuclear isotope production at the Advanced Rare IsotopE Laboratory (ARIEL). This particle accelerator will produce radioisotopes in the neutron rich region of the nuclear landscape via photofission, whose yields strongly depend on the incident beam energy. To date, the e-Linac has been commissioned up to 10kW...
The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration is combining the well-established technologies of bubble chambers and liquid noble scintillators to develop a detector sensitive to low-energy nuclear recoils with the goal of a GeV-scale dark matter search. Liquid noble bubble chambers benefit from excellent electronic recoil suppression intrinsic in bubble chambers with the addition of...
Over more than a decade, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has accumulated enormous datasets of neutrinos with energies in the GeV to PeV-scale, opening a new window with which to observe the Universe. In this talk I will discuss the latest IceCube results, and provide a look forward of what to expect from the next generation of neutrino telescopes including the Canada-based Pacific Ocean...
We show that, in a $U(1)_{R-L}$-symmetric supersymmetric model, the pseudo-Dirac bino and wino can give rise to three light neutrino masses through effective operators, generated at the messenger scale between a SUSY breaking hidden sector and the visible sector. The neutrino-bino/wino mixing follows a hybrid type I+III inverse seesaw pattern. The light neutrino masses are governed by the...
Neutrinoless double-beta decay ($0\nu\beta\beta$) is a hypothetical, Standard-Model forbidden nuclear process in which two beta decays occur simultaneously without the emission of antineutrinos. Its observation would imply the Majorana nature of neutrinos, proving that they are their own antiparticles, and provide critical insight into the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the...
Collimated beams of particles called ‘jets’ are a common product of proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located in CERN, Geneva. These jets are crucial for many standard model and beyond the standard model analyses performed with the ATLAS detector and as such, having the correct calibration and uncertainties for these objects is incredibly important. A large component...
The ATLAS detector is a general purpose detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that investigates a variety of physics, ranging from Higgs boson to possible particles that make up of dark matter. The LHC will be upgraded to become High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) at the end of this decade, and in subsequent run periods a high-pileup environment resulting in up to 200 events per proton-proton...
The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) records events with energies up to 13TeV using multiple complementary detectors. As a general-purpose detector, ATLAS employs a highly sophisticated software system to reconstruct events for a variety of analyses. These analyses encompass many orders of magnitude of energy and momentum requiring accurate reconstruction at all energy...
In order to perform searches for high-precision measurements and searches for new phenomena, experiments must account for differences between simulation and collected data. The LHC collects a huge amount of data every second, but only some of it is useful for various kinds of analyses. One way of filtering out useful events is by the usage of a sophisticated triggering system. In order to...
Our ATLAS analysis group is performing a search in proton-proton collisions at the LHC for $H^{\pm} \rightarrow W^{\pm}Z$ and $H^{\pm\pm} \rightarrow W^{\pm}W^{\pm}$ produced via vector boson fusion with a fully leptonic final state. This process can be imitated by many other events produced at ATLAS, such as QCD and EW processes with W and Z bosons in the final state. Thus, this analysis...
There is currently an abundance of astrophysical evidence suggesting the existence of extra mass in the universe whose particle constituents cannot be explained by the Standard Model. Numerous theories were derived in an attempt to provide potential particle candidates for dark matter which are searched for by direct and indirect experiments. However, instead of focusing on finding a dark...
Nuclear beta and electron capture (EC) decay serve as sensitive probes of the structure and symmetries at the microscopic scale of our Universe. As such, precision measurements of the final-state products in these processes can be used as powerful laboratories to search for new physics from the meV to TeV scale, as well as addressing fundamental questions of quantum mechanics at the subatomic...
In the framework of the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT), the Standard Model can be seen as a low-energy approximation of a deeper, more fundamental theory that introduces new heavy particles at a higher energy scale, $\Lambda$. By integrating out these beyond-the-Standard-Model (BSM) particles, SMEFT offers a model-independent way to describe their potential effects.
This talk...
The Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 using data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Since its discovery, it has been observed interacting with heavy standard model (SM) particles such as Z and W bosons and heavy quarks. A more interesting search focuses on the Higgs interactions with light SM particles such as the muon manifested in the Higgs-to-dimuon decay path. According to SM...
The ATLAS experiment, located at CERN, studies high energy proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator. One of the main goals of the ATLAS experiment is to study the properties of the Higgs boson. With the discovery of the Higgs boson at ATLAS and CMS in 2012, the focus has shifted to studying the properties of...
Calculation of the free muon lifetime is a classical particle physics problem that was solved long time ago and its solution can be found in various textbook. Evaluation of the bound muon decay rate is significantly more complicated problem that requires a lot of laborious calculations and contains some non trivial physical effects as well. First calculation of the bound muon lifetime was done...
Almost half of the elements heavier than iron are produced through the r-process. While it is now recognized that the r-process occurs in neutron star mergers, evidence suggests additional sites must also contribute. One such possibility is core-collapse supernovae, which are predicted to be driven by the weak r-process, where heavy elements are synthesized via a series of ($\alpha$,n)...
This work aims to correct/measure the elemental abundance found in supernova remnants. XSPEC, the most widely used program for measuring elemental abundances from X-ray spectra, uses a fixed value (solar abundance) for the hydrogen and helium abundances. This is a reasonable approximation in hydrogen-rich portions of a supernova remnant such as the forward shock. However, this assumption is...
The nuclear Equation of State (EOS) represents the interactions of dense nuclear matter and is used to study astrophysical objects like neutron stars. It is directly correlated with neutron skin thickness, which is a phenomenon describing the layer of outermost neutrons observed to envelop large nuclei. The most accurate way to study neutron skin thickness is through Parity Violating Electron...
The ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser PHysics Apparatus) experiment, based at CERN, investigates the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem by producing and trapping neutral antihydrogen to compare it with hydrogen. ALPHA has performed the first measurement of the 1S-2S transition in antihydrogen, as well as the first observations of the ground state hyperfine splitting, 1S-2P Lyman-alpha transition, and...
Same-sign lepton colliders offer a promising environment to probe lepton number violation. In this talk, we show discuss processes that change lepton number by two units in the context of Majorana heavy neutral leptons and neutrinophilic scalars at μTRISTAN, a proposed same-sign muon collider. We will show that same-sign lepton colliders, with modest energy and luminosity requirements, can...
Heavy-ion collisions have reached energies high enough to melt the nucleus into its fundamental constituents, the quarks and gluons, making a Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). In addition to creating the QGP, these collisions can transfer large momenta to a small subset of quarks and gluons (also known as partons), thus promoting these partons to a highly excited state, which will subsequently radiate...
Ultra-relativistic heavy-ions collisions performed at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produce a de-confined state of quarks and gluons, called quark-gluon plasma (QGP). One of the primary goals of these collisions is to learn the properties of QGP, through the modifications it imparts on jets and photons. Jets are a collimated spray of particles...
The Jefferson Lab $\eta$ Factory (JEF) will start acquiring data in early 2025. The experiment aims to give insight into the connection between Dark Matter physics models and the Standard Model by investigating rare decay processes of $\eta$ and $\eta'$ mesons. Several other physics motivations are also a key factor of the experiment, such as probing $C$ and/or $P$ violation and aspects of...
Unveiling Hadronic Mass Generation Through Light Meson Structure with ePIC$^{✝}$
Love Preet$^{1,*}$, G. M. Huber$^{1}$, S. J. D. Kay$^{2}$
$^{1}$University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, S4S 0A2, Canada
$^{2}$University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, UK
The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will be the world’s first polarized collider facility that is planned to be...
Fermilab's 2023 measurement of the muon's anomalous magnetic moment ($a_\mu = (g-2)_\mu/2$) has heightened the discrepancy between experimental results and Standard Model predictions to $5.0\sigma$. By employing the structure of finite-energy QCD sum rules (FESR) and H\"older inequalities, the hadronic vacuum polarization (HVP) contribution to the leading order (LO) muon $g-2$ anomaly...
Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs) are a huge advancement in our understanding of hadronic structure and non-perturbative QCD. To study GPDs, one may use the Deep Exclusive Meson Production (DEMP) reaction, but first one must find the Q^2 regime where DEMP is factorizable. The factorization regime is where the cross-section can be divided into two parts, a hard part calculated with pQCD,...
The Water Cherenkov Test Experiment (WCTE) is a test experiment at CERN designed to enhance the sensitivity and calibration techniques of the Hyper-Kamiokande experiment. It provides a vital platform for developing calibration methods by exposing detectors to particle fluxes with well-defined types and kinematic properties. The particle identification system of WCTE comprises several detector...
