Events at Director’s Conference Room (50A5132) LBNL

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Title: Cosmological Production of ROMP Dark Matter Abstract:Rapidly Oscillating Massive Particles (ROMPs) arise in quantum systems with non-diagonal interaction Hamiltonians. This misalignment between flavor and mass eigenstates leads to oscillations between flavor states, such as those between electron and muon neutrinos in the Standard Model, or between active and sterile neutrinos in Beyond the Standard Model frameworks to name just … Read More

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Title: Explaining Exotic Hadrons from QCD Abstract: Exotic hadrons are enigmatic particles that cannot be explained as mesons made of a quark-antiquark pair or baryons made of three quarks. Most of those that have been observed are hidden-heavy hadrons containing a heavy quark-antiquark pair. They are typically found near the threshold for the production of two heavy hadrons. The nature … Read More

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Title: Big Bang Nucleosynthesis: New Physics and New Tools Abstract: Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) is a powerful tool for probing both new physics and LCDM, and complements analyses utilizing the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and results from particle experiment.  I will provide two examples of BBN probes of BSM models.  I will then discuss new kinds of analyses that can … Read More

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Title: The Piezoaxionic Effect: dark matter detection and new forces Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss two new and closely related experimental observables designed to search for the QCD axion. These observables are based on piezoelectric materials that spontaneously break parity symmetry, therefore enabling sensitivity to the axion’s fundamental, model independent coupling to gluons. The first of these explores … Read More

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Title: Neutrino-nucleus interaction modeling in long-baseline neutrino experiments Abstract: Neutrino-nucleus cross sections are an important facet of interpreting results in accelerator neutrino experiments. However, these cross sections are still not theoretically well understood, which can have consequences in a wide array of physics analyses. In this talk, I will discuss how the interplay between cross section mis-modeling and near detector tunes, … Read More

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Title: Cascade production (dramatically) improves beam dump sensitivities to long-lived particles Abstract: High intensity beam dumps offer some of the strongest constraints on long-lived particles for masses below a few GeV.  Sensitivity projections and exclusion limits are often computed in a conservative “primary only” approximation where only the flux generated by the beam’s primary interactions are included.  In this talk I … Read More

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Title: QCD Axion Dark Matter in String Theory Abstract: In this talk, I will attempt to answer the question “If we detect the QCD axion, what will we learn about string theory?” In recent years, we have observed a striking fact in the largest class of explicit compactifications of string theory: they all come with axions, and the properties of … Read More

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Title: Dark Matter Annihilation and the Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess Abstract: The Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess has a spectrum, angular distribution, and overall intensity that are in remarkable agreement with that expected from annihilating dark matter particles in the form of a ∼ 50 GeV thermal relic. Alternatively, it has been suggested that this signal might be produced by a … Read More

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Title: Novel computational perspectives on matter-wave interferometry Abstract: Matter-wave interferometry holds promise as a powerful quantum sensing technique for fundamental physics. From a theoretical standpoint, it is essential to identify the observables that can be accessed experimentally and compute signatures from phenomena of interest in a tractable and consistent manner. In this talk, I will present two novel approaches that achieve this: … Read More