Stefan Schacht (Cornell) “CP Violation in Charmed Meson and Baryon Decays”
ABSTRACT: We discuss the implications of the recent discovery of CP violation in charm decays at LHCb. Furthermore, we show in which modes to search for charm CP violation next and present U-spin sum rules for CP asymmetries of charmed baryon decays.
Prateek Agrawall (Harvard) “QCD Axions Beyond the QCD Axion”
ABSTRACT: The QCD axion is a very well-motivated extension of the standard model that explains the strong-CP puzzle and is an excellent dark matter candidate. The simplest models of the QCD axion are very predictive and set up a narrow target space for experiments. I will describe interesting cosmological and field theory mechanisms which broaden this parameter space significantly. This … Read More
Monica Pate (Harvard) “Measuring Color Memory in a Color Glass Condensate at Electron-Ion Colliders”
ABSTRACT: We review the color memory effect which is the non-abelian gauge theoretic analog of the gravitational memory effect, in which the passage of color radiation induces a net relative SU(3) color rotation of a pair of nearby quarks. Then, we show how the color memory effect arises in Regge limit scattering processes and propose that this effect can be … Read More
Marc Kamionkowski (Johns Hopkins) “The Gravitational-Wave Background: Sources and Detection”
Abstract: Our Universe should be filled with a stochastic gravitational-wave background due to several traditional astrophysical sources and possibly some early-Universe sources. I will review some of these sources and then discuss work on an array of techniques to seek/constrain the gravitational-wave background, including measurement of small- and large-scale CMB temperature/polarization fluctuations, weak lensing, pulsar-timing measurements, stellar astrometry, and circular … Read More
David McKeen (Triumf) “Connections between the hard to see: dark matter and neutrinos”
Abstract: Neutrinos and dark matter both provide evidence that the standard model is incomplete. Could they be connected in some way? Both dark matter and neutrinos weakly interact with the matter that we are familiar with but there is reason to believe that they couple to one another more strongly. I’ll review these motivations along with some recent developments in … Read More
Adrienne Erickcek (UNC) “Illuminating the Early Universe with Dark Matter Minihalos”
ABSTRACT: As remnants of the earliest stages of structure formation, the smallest dark matter halos provide a unique probe of the density fluctuations generated during inflation and the evolution of the Universe shortly after inflation. The absence of early-forming ultra-compact minihalos (UCMHs) establishes an upper bound on the amplitude of the primordial power spectrum on small scales and has been … Read More
Josh Ruderman (NYU) “21cm and the Soft Photon Frontier”
abstract: The Rayleigh-Jeans tail of the CMB is poorly constrained at low energies, and therefore could be highly distorted from a blackbody consistent with current measurements. I will describe how dark radiation, composed of dark photons, can inject soft photons from resonant oscillations during the dark ages. A small fraction of the Universe’s energy in dark photons can produce large … Read More
Daniel Litim (Sussex U) “Asymptotic Safety and Physics Beyond the Standard Model”
I discuss the status and prospects for asymptotically safe particle theories without gravity. This covers an overview of rigorous results for interacting fixed points in general 4d quantum field theories at weak coupling, strict no-go theorems, examples with or w/o supersymmetry, and links with critical phenomena and conformal field theory. Our findings also offer new directions for model building for … Read More
Sokratis Trifinopoulos (ETH Zurich) “B-physics anomalies: The bridge between R-parity violating Supersymmetry and flavoured Dark Matter”
In recent years, significant experimental indications that point towards Lepton Flavour Universality violating effects in B-decays, involving b→cτν and b→sℓ+ℓ− have been accumulated. A possible New Physics explanation can be sought within the framework of R-parity violating Supersymmetry, which contains the necessary ingredients to explain the anomalies via both leptoquark, tree-level exchange and one-loop diagrams involving purely leptonic interactions. In … Read More
Pouya Asadi (MIT) “The title of my talk is (in TEX format): $R_{D^{(*)}}$”
*SPECIAL LOCATION* 325 LeConte Hall, UCB-Campus The title of my talk is (in TEX format): $R_{D^{(*)}}$ And the abstract is : The charged-current flavor anomalies $R_{D^{(*)}}$ are currently one of the most significant hints of new physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). In this talk, I will overview the status of these anomalies and their viable minimal solutions. I will … Read More