Past Events

Abstract:  Gravitational lensing of CMB photons by the matter distribution of the Universe can be both a blessing and nuisance. It's a blessing because of the way it can be harnessed to map the structures responsible for the deflections, and from this, constrain any physics affecting the growth of cosmic structure, such as the sum of the neutrino masses or dark matter. But lensing is also a nuisance because it generates B-mode polarization which obscures the highly-sought-after primordial signal associated with gravitational waves generated during cosmic inflation, our most accessible…

Abstract:  The discovery of neutrino oscillations provides the first indication of a lepton flavor violating (LFV) process, one that isn't predicted by the Standard Model. Extending the Standard Model picture to account for this usually proceeds via the addition of new mass terms, either Dirac or Majorana in nature or both, to the Standard Model Lagrangian. Probing the LFV process by characterizing the strength of neutrino oscillations is therefore fundamental to understanding the nature of neutrino masses. In addition, there…

Abstract: Hawking famously argued, based on semiclassical calculations, that the radiation from evaporating black holes is contains no information about the matter that fell in. This would be inconsistent with the unitarity of quantum mechanics. In this talk, I will show that, in more careful ‘replica trick’ calculations, the gravitational path integral becomes dominated at late times by saddles containing spacetime wormholes. These wormholes cause the entropy to decrease after the Page time, consistent with unitarity, and allow information to…

David Weinberg (OSU) "Cosmology Past, Present, and Future" I will give a broad overview of the current state of observational cosmology, with historical context and an eye to the future.  Developments over the past three decades have led to a standard cosmological scenario that is remarkably successful at explaining a wide array of high precision measurements.  However, this scenario leaves several big questions at best partially answered.  What is dark matter?  Why is the expansion of the universe accelerating?  What…

Abstract: Events containing disappearing tracks originating from the decay of a heavy and electrically charged long-lived particle to a pair of undetectable particles are key to the discovery of compelling minimal dark matter models at collider experiments. This talk will present the prospects for a search for such experimental signature at a future muon collider. Techniques dedicated to the suppression of the backgrounds induced by the in-flight decays of the muon beams will be presented and the results compared to…

Abstract: As part of the Phase 2 upgrade of the ATLAS detector to ready it for operation at the High-Luminosity LHC the inner tracking system will be replaced by an all silicon Inner Tracker (ITk). The Pixel and Strip system of the ITK are now leaving the prototyping phase and preparing the start of the (pre) production phase. As part of this transition I plan to report on the latest status of the detector design and retrospectively discuss major design…

​Abstract:  ​The high luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scheduled for 2025-2027, will significantly increase the instantaneous luminosity of the LHC collisions. The resulting large proton-proton collision datasets will allow precise measurements of Higgs​ boson​ properties, searches for ​very ​rare processes, and much more. To cope with the challenging ​experimental ​environment ​resulting ​from the high luminosity, significant upgrades will be required for the LHC ​detectors. A key upgrade of the CMS ​detector is to incorporate the identification of…

Abstract: The Forward Search Experiment (FASER) is the newest experiment at the LHC, approved in 2019 and recently installed into the CERN LHC complex. It is a small and inexpensive experiment placed 500 meters downstream of the ATLAS interaction point. FASER is designed to capture decays of exotic particles, produced in the very forward region, out of the ATLAS detector acceptance. In addition, FASERnu, a FASER sub-detector, is designed to detect collider neutrinos for the first time and study their…