Conveners
Morning 2 - Particle Physics
- Darren Grant (Simon Fraser University)
Description
Detectors for particle physics
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 fundamental symmetries between matter and anti-matter can be precisely probed via the most basic (anti)atom (anti)Hydrogen. Anti-atoms are commonly studied by trapping them with confining magnetic fields, these fields induce Zeeman shifting of the atomic levels, which introduce uncertainties. To navigate this problem, and to enable quantum sensing techniques such as anti-atom...
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...
KDK and KDK+ research is focused on the Potassium-40 decays (40K). The most frequent decay mode is a β- decay to calcium-40. 40K also has an electron capture decay to the excited state of argon-40, as well as two much rarer decays, in the form of an electron capture and a β+ decay to the ground state of argon-40. The electron capture decay of 40K to the ground state of 40Ar was only recently...
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...
PIONEER is a next-generation pion decay experiment that will run at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. In its initial phase, the primary objective is to improve the measurement of the branching ratio: $R_{e/\mu}=\frac{\text{BR}(\pi\rightarrow e \nu (\gamma))}{\text{BR}(\pi\rightarrow \mu \nu (\gamma))}$. This measurement aims to surpass by more than an order of magnitude the precision...
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...
