| Physics at the University of Virginia | ||||||
| Academics | People | Research | Announcements | Facilities | Administration | Classes |
| Wednesday, October 20, 1999 | Bill Bardeen [Host: Thacker/Horvath] | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
Fermilab | |
| Physics Building | “Weak Matrix Elements in the Large Nc expansion of QCD ” |
| Wednesday, November 17, 1999 | Cynthia Keppel [Host: S. Luiti] | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
Hampton University / Jefferson Lab | |
| Physics Building | “Quark-Hadron Duality - Recent results from Jefferson Lab” |
| Wednesday, December 1, 1999 | Igor Musatov | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
Old Dominion University | |
| Physics Building | “Non-forward Parton Distribution and Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering” |
| Wednesday, December 8, 1999 | Carl Carlson | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
College of William and Mary | |
| Physics Building | “Excited Baryons in Large Nc QCD” |
| Wednesday, February 16, 2000 | Peter Arnold | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
University of Virginia | |
| Physics Building | “Efferctive theories of electroweak baryon number violation” |
| Wednesday, February 16, 2000 | Ben White [Host: P. Q. Hung] | |
|
4:15 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
University of Swansea | |
| Physics Building | “The Angular Momentum Sum-Rule - - - Spin-Doctoring the Proton” |
|
Thursday, February 17, 2000 Note Special Day |
Pedro Mercadente [Host: P. Q. Hung] | |
|
4:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
Florida State University | |
| Physics Building | “Supersymmetry Breaking in SO(10) models” |
| Wednesday, February 23, 2000 | Tom Cohen [Host: J.V. Noble] | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
University of Maryland | |
| Physics Building | “Effective and Ineffective Field Theory in Nuclear Physics” |
| Wednesday, March 1, 2000 | John McCune [Host: Hank Thacker] | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
University of Virginia | |
| Physics Building | “Chiral Symmetry and Long Wavelength Dirac Eigenmodes in QCD” |
| Wednesday, March 8, 2000 | Professor Konrad Kleinknecht [Host: Brad Cox] | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany | |
| Physics Building | “Recent Results from the NA48 Kaon Decay Experiment at CERN” |
| The origin of the violation of CP (particle-antiparticle) symmetry in decays of neutral K mesons has been unclear for a long time after its discovery. The question is whether this violation is due to a new superweak interaction or to a small part of the well-known weak interaction. An experiment at CERN in 1988 (NA31) indicated that epsilon', the parameter that distinguishes between the two possibilities, is different from zero, thus pointing to the latter possibility, while an experiment at FNAL found a result consistent with zero. NA48 has measured the parameter epsilon'/epsilon of direct CP violation and confirms the earlier observation of NA31. Results will be given, as well as some results on rare Kaon decays. Postcript: This result was announced for the first time on March 7th at CERN. This will be the first North American discussion of this crucial measurement which points to the origin of CP (time reversal) violation. |
|
Thursday, March 9, 2000 Note Special Day |
Prof. Sibaji Raha [Host: P. K. Kabir] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Bose Institute, Calcutta and Brookhaven National laboratory, Upton, NY | |
| Physics Building | “QCD and Dark Matter” |
| Wednesday, March 22, 2000 | Geoffrey Court [Host: Donald Crabb] | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
University of Liverpool | |
| Physics Building | “An Update on Nucleon Spin Structure Measurements at HERMES” |
|
Friday, April 28, 2000 Note Special Day |
Howard Georgi [Host: P. Q. Hung] | |
|
2:00 PM, Room 203 Note Special Time |
Harvard University | |
| Physics Building | “Dynamically Broken Topcolor - Building Higgs Bosons without Other Higgs Bosons” |
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Monday, June 12, 2000 Note Special Day |
Professor Tatsuya Nakada [Host: Brad Cox] | |
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3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
CERN and Paul Scherrer Institute | |
| Physics Building | “Present Status of LHCb An Experiment to Make Precision Studies of CP Violation in Beauty Hadron Decays” |
| Wednesday, August 2, 2000 | Martin Mojzis [Host: Ivan Horvath] | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 313* Note Special Time |
Comunius University, Bratislava | |
| Physics Building | “Reordering the Chiral Expansion - Solution of the Old Puzzle” |
| Wednesday, October 4, 2000 | Robert Rossmanith [Host: Blaine Norum ] | |
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3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe | |
| Physics Building | “High Power EUV Radiation Sources for Lithography” |
| Wednesday, November 15, 2000 | Tim Holmstrom [Host: Hank Thacker] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Virginia | |
| Physics Building | “Measuring CP violation in Hyperons” |
| Wednesday, November 29, 2000 | Marcos Seco-Miquelez [Host: H. Thacker] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | UVA - Department of Physics | |
| Physics Building | “Baryogenesis in the MSSM” |
| Wednesday, February 21, 2001 | Lars Bildsten [Host: P. Q. Hung] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ITP, Santa Barbara | |
| Physics Building | “Gravitational Radiation from Accreting Neutron Stars: Implications for Millisecond Pulsar Formation and LIGO” |
| Wednesday, April 11, 2001 | John Shields | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | UVA-High Energy Physics | |
| Physics Building | “Physics of KL --> pi+pi- gamma at Ktev” |
| Wednesday, April 18, 2001 | Svyatoslav Tkachenko [Host: Hank Thacker] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Virginia - Department of Physics | |
| Physics Building | “The phase transition temperature of relativistic phi-4 theory” |
| Wednesday, April 25, 2001 | Alexander Golossanov [Host: H. Thacker] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | UVA - High Energy Physics | |
| Physics Building | “Physics of Decay KL --> pi+pi-e+e- at kTeV” |
|
Thursday, April 26, 2001 Note Special Day |
Sang-Joon Lee [Host: Harry Thacker] | |
|
4:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
University of Minnesota | |
| Physics Building | “A Measurement of the (D+ --> K-bar*0 l+ nul) (D+ --> K-bar0 l+ nul) Branching Fractions” |
| Wednesday, May 2, 2001 | Xuepeng Sun | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | UVA | |
| Physics Building | “Monte Carlo Simulation of Phase Transition in 3D O(N) Phi-4 theory” |
| Wednesday, May 16, 2001 | Deitrich Bodeker [Host: Peter Arnold] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Brookhaven National Laboratory | |
| Physics Building | “A local Langevin equation for slow long distance modes in hot Yang-Mills” |
|
Friday, August 17, 2001 Note Special Day |
Heinrick Paes [Host: P. Q. Hung] | |
|
2:00 PM, Room 313 Note Special Time |
Vanderbilt University | |
| Physics Building | “Absolute neutrino mass determination” |
| Wednesday, October 31, 2001 | Antonio Delgado [Host: Marcos-Seco] | |
|
12:45 PM, Room 313 Note Special Time |
Johns Hopkins University | |
| Physics Building | “Electroweak Breaking from the Bulk of Extra Dimensions” |
| Wednesday, November 7, 2001 | Raju Venugopalan [Host: S. Liuti] | |
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12:45 PM, Room 313 Note Special Time |
Brookhaven National laboratory | |
| Physics Building | “Melting the Color Glass Condensate in Heavy Ions Collisions” |
| Wednesday, April 10, 2002 | Paul Frampton [Host: P. Q. Hung] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | |
| Physics Building | “Zeroes of the neutrino mass matrix” |
| Wednesday, April 17, 2002 | Bogdan Morariu [Host: Paul Fendley] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Rockefeller University | |
| Physics Building | “Quantum mechanics on noncommutative Riemann surfaces” |
| Wednesday, May 1, 2002 | Craig Dukes [Host: H. Thacker] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Virginia | |
| Physics Building | “The CKM Experiment at Fermilab: Attacking the CKM Matrix Using Charged Kaons” |
| The CKM (Charged Kaons at the Main injector) collaboration is planning a new Fermilab experiment whose goal is to measure the Cabibbo, Kobayashi, Maskawa matrix element V(td) with a statistical precision of 5%. This is done through the measurement of the branching ratio of the ultra-rare charged kaon decay: K+ -> pi+ nu nu. This measurement will play a critical role in testing the Standard Model hypothesis that the sole source of CP violation in nature resides in the imaginary parts of the Cabibbo, Kobayashi, Maskawa matrix elements. Attacking this question in the kaon sector is both experimentally and theoretically independent of the ongoing programs to measure these same parameters in the B meson sector. To make this challenging measurement a novel decay-in-flight spectrometer has been designed. I will discuss the physics, the spectrometer, and give the status of the experiment. |
| Wednesday, October 9, 2002 | Djordje Minic [Host: Paul Fendley] | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
Virginia Tech | |
| Physics Building | “Holographic Renormalization Group, Time and String Theory” |
| Wednesday, December 4, 2002 | Jonathan Lenaghan [Host: H. Thacker] | |
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3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
UVA | |
| Physics Building | “Mesoscopic QCD and the Theta-Vacua” |
| The partition functions of gauge theories with spontaneously broken chiral symmetries are analyzed for an arbitrary number of flavors, N_f, and arbitrary quark masses including the contributions from all topological sectors in the Leutwyler--Smilga regime. In the Leutwyler--Smilga regime, the theories only depend on simple combinations of quark masses, volume, chiral condensate and vacuum angle. We consider the cases of quarks in the adjoint and fundamental representation separately. For two and three flavors, the \theta dependence of the QCD vacuum is studied in detail. We find a discontinuity at \theta=\pi in the first derivative of the energy density with respect to \theta for degenerate quark masses. This corresponds to the first--order phase transition in which CP is spontaneously broken, known as Dashen's phenomena. We derive simple expressions for the chiral condensate and the topological density and show that they are in fact related. By examining the zeros of the various partition functions, we elucidate the mechanism leading to Dashen's phenomena in QCD. |
| Wednesday, February 5, 2003 | Prof. Robert Hirosky [Host: Brad Cox] | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
UVA | |
| Physics Building | “Panning for Gold (or Finding your physics in a torrent of data)” |
| Interesting physics interactions occur copiously at high energy hadron colliders. However, these events are often swamped by background interactions with rates many orders of magnitude greater. Further, bandwidth and storage constraints require O(10^5-10^6) or greater real time data rejection for collecting data samples. This talk will review the 'Trigger' or real time data selection strategies used in the D-Zero experiment at Fermilab and review the "golden" physics channels sought in the Run 2 collider program. |
| Wednesday, February 19, 2003 | Adam Lewandowski [Host: Donal Day] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Johns Hopkins | |
| Physics Building | “Running with the Radius in RS1” |
| We find a renormalization group formalism in the compactified Randall-Sundrum scenario with the renormalization scale set by the radius of the compact space. Couplings on the hidden brane run with the size of the space. We use this formalism to demonstrate the stability of the hierarchy. |
| Wednesday, March 19, 2003 | Gert Aarts [Host: Peter Arnold] | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
Ohio State University | |
| Physics Building | “Transport coefficients in hot field theory” |
| Wednesday, March 26, 2003 | Thomas Curtwright [Host: Hank Thacker] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Miami | |
| Physics Building | “Developments in time evolution” |
| Properties of quantum Nambu-brackets are studied in various physical situations. The brackets are shown to define time evolution in ways that can be quite novel, perhaps even very unusual, but which are nonetheless always fully consistent. The key physical ideas are to use different time scales on different invariant sectors of a system, and to conjoin time evolution with symmetries of the system's dynamics. For finite times, this formulation of time-development is not the usual unitary transformation, but nonetheless it gives results from which conventional, unitarily evolved data can be recovered. The methods are applicable to quantum field theory, perhaps the physical deas more generally than the Nambu brackets. |
| Wednesday, April 2, 2003 | Andrea Soddu [Host: P. Q. Hung] | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
UVA | |
| Physics Building | “Phenomenology of a mass matrix from six dimensions” |
| A model with two compactified extra spatial dimensions is introduced. A mass matrix with democratic structure, a common Yukawa coupling for the three families and all the matrix elements of the same order of magnitude, is derived. The mass spectrum and CKM matrix obtained in a ten parameter version of the model will be presented together with a possible scenario which could solve the Strong CP problem without axions. |
| Wednesday, April 9, 2003 | Carston Vogt [Host: J. Lenaghan] | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
Nordita | |
| Physics Building | “Photon emission from dense quark matter in compact stars” |
| Quark matter at large baryon density is characterised by a colour-flavour-locked phase where chiral symmetry is broken. This leads to the appearance of the light octet of Goldstone bosons. At temperatures below the gap which results from quark pairing, the light Goldstone bosons are the dominant degrees of freedom and provide the main source for photon emission. We calculate photon emission rates from scattering of Goldstone bosons and discuss possible observational consequences of our results for compact stars featuring colour-superconductivity. |
| Wednesday, April 16, 2003 | Prof. Xiangdong Ji [Host: Xiaotong Song] | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
Univ. of Maryland | |
| Physics Building | “Viewing the nucleon through "color" filters” |
| While the form factors and parton distributions provide separately the shape of the proton in coordinate and momentum spaces, a more powerful imaging of the proton structure can be obtained through phase-space distributions. In this talk, I introduce the Wigner-type quark and gluon distributions which depict a full-3D proton at every fixed light-cone momentum, like what is seen through momentum ("color")-filters. After appropriate phase-space reductions, the Wigner distributions are related to the generalized parton distributions (GPD's) and transverse-momentum dependent parton distributions, which are measurable in high-energy experiments. The new interpretation of GPD's provides a classical way to visualize the orbital motion of the quarks, which is known to be the key to the spin and magnetic moment of the proton. |
| Wednesday, May 7, 2003 | Dr. Bonnie Fleming [Host: Lanchun Lu] | |
|
4:00 PM, Room 313 Note Special Time |
FermiLab | |
| Physics Building | “FINeSE: Fermilab Intense Neutrino Scattering Experiment” |
| The Booster neutrino beamline at Fermilab provides the world's highest intensity neutrino beam in the 0.5-1.0 GeV energy range. There is a wealth of neutrino physics that can be accomplished using this beam in addition to the oscillation physics already underway. A 10 ton detector located at 100 meters from the recently commissioned Booster neutrino source would definitively measure the strange quark contribution to the nucleon spin. In addition, it would also complement the existing MiniBooNE oscillation experimental program by, along with MiniBooNE data, making an improved measurement of the search for muon neutrino disappearance in a region of particular interest to cosmologists. FINeSE will also be able to investigate neutrino-scattering cross sections at low energy, in a region where there is growing interest in neutrino scattering interactions. This physics program and the FINeSE detector will be presented. |
|
Monday, August 18, 2003 Note Special Day |
Kim Splittorff | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 313 Note Special Time |
State University of New York, Stony Brook | |
| Physics Building | “Elitzur's theorem and the sign problem” |
| Elitzur's theorem stating the impossibility of spontaneous breaking of local symmetries in a gauge theory is reexamined. The existing proofs of this theorem rely on gauge invariance as well as positivity of the weight in the Euclidean partition function. We examine the validity of Elitzur's theorem in gauge theories for which the Euclidean measure of the partition function is not positive definite. We find that Elitzur's theorem does not follow from gauge invariance alone. We formulate a general criterion under which spontaneous breaking of local symmetries in a gauge theory is excluded. Finally we illustrate the results in an exactly solvable two dimensional abelian gauge theory. |
| Wednesday, October 22, 2003 | Andrew Norman [Host: Craig Dukes] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | College of William and Mary | |
| Physics Building | “Measurement of the Branching Fraction for K-long -> mu+ mu- e+ e-” |
| This seminar will describe the measurement of decay of the long lived neutral kaon into two muons and two electrons. The measurement was performed using the data taken during experiment E871 which ws performed on the B5 beamline at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) of the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL).(For a complete abstract, please see posted announcement in the Physics Bldg. ) |
| Wednesday, November 12, 2003 | Imran Younus [Host: Craig Dukes] | |
|
4:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
Syracuse University | |
| Physics Building | “Precision Measurement of the Weak Mixing Angle in Parity-Violating Moller Scattering” |
| SLAC E158 is an experiment to measure the parity non-conserving asymmetry in Moller scattering. Longitudinally polarized 48 GeV electrons are scattered off unpolarized (atomic) electrons in a liquid hydrogen target with an average Q2 of 0.027 GeV2. The asymmetry in this process is proportional to the weak mixing angle. The preliminary results give APV = –151.9 +/– 29.0(stat) +/– 32.5(syst) parts per billion. For the sine of the weak mixing angle 0.2371 +/– 0.0025 +/– 0.0027, which is consistent with the Standard Model prediction (0.2386 +/– 0.0006). |
|
Monday, January 5, 2004 Note Special Day |
Mike Strickland [Host: Peter Arnold] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Techische Universitat , Vienna | |
| Physics Building | “Collective Modes of an Anisotropic QGP” |
| In this talk I will discuss the collective modes of a quark-gluon plasma which has a momentum-space anisotropy in the quark and/or gluon districution functions. I will derive the hard thermal loop gluon self-energies using classical kinetic theory for anistropic systems and show that in addition to the normal stable aluonic quasiparticle modes there exist also unstable gluonic quasiparticle modes which can affect the thermalization and isotropization of a quark-gluon plasma. I will then demonstrate how the anisotropic HTL gluonic self-energy can be used to calculate the directional dependence of the heavy quark energy loss in an anisotropic QGP. Along the way I will also talk a bit about the isotopic limit and demonstrate that the heavy quark energy loss obtained is never negative. |
| Wednesday, January 21, 2004 | V. Jejjala [Host: Paul Fendley] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Virginia Tech | |
| Physics Building | “Deconstruction and the Cosmological Constant” |
| Wednesday, March 24, 2004 | Ngoc-Khanh Tran [Host: Hank Thacker] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | UVA | |
| Physics Building | “Many New Faces of Extradimension Theory” |
| Wednesday, April 7, 2004 | Michael Ronquest [Host: Hank Thacker] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | UVA | |
| Physics Building | “Search For New Direct CP Violation in Neutral Kaon Decays” |
| Wednesday, April 21, 2004 | Swapan Chattopadhyah [Host: Blaine Norum] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | JLab | |
| Physics Building | “To the Frontiers of HighField/High Energy Density Physics and Ultrafast Processes via Energy Recovering Linacs” |
| Wednesday, April 28, 2004 | Barry Holstein [Host: Hank Thacker] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Massachusetts | |
| Physics Building | “Effective Interactions are Effective Interactions” |
| The use of effective field theory techniques will be discussed and applications given in classical and quantum mechanics, in condensed matter physics, in QCD, and in quantum gravity. |
|
Friday, May 21, 2004 Note Special Day |
Bill Molzon's [Host: Craig Dukes] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of California at Irvine | |
| Physics Building | “The MECO Experiment to Search for Mu N- ---> e- N with 10-17 Sensitivity” |
| The Muon to Electron Conversion (MECO) experiment is designed to detect the coherent conversion of muons to electrons in the field of a nucleus if this process occurs as infrequently as once for 10-17 muons that are captured in a muonic atom. To date, no examples of muon and electron number violating transitions have been seen in charged lepton processes, and MECO will improve the sensitivity of past searches by 3-4 orders of magnitude. MECO has sufficient sensitivity to discover this muon-number violating process if it occurs at rates predicted in several well-motivated models for physics beyond the Standard Model, e.g. a broad class of grand-unified supersymmetric models. I will briefly discuss the motivation for and status of searches for lepton flavor violating (LFV) processes and the status of other experiments under construction, and then describe the MECO experiment. I will concentrate on recent progress on some technical aspects of the experiment and present the prospects for its construction and operation. |
| Wednesday, September 15, 2004 | Alexander Kaganovich [Host: P.Q. Hung] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Ben Gurion University | |
| Physics Building | “Some Old Puzzles of Particle Physics and Cosmology in the Light of the the Two Measures Theory” |
| Wednesday, September 22, 2004 | David Richards [Host: Hank Thacker] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | J Lab | |
| Physics Building | “Hadron Structure from Lattice QCD” |
| Wednesday, September 29, 2004 | Rick Jesik [Host: Bob Hirosky] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Imperial College, London | |
| Physics Building | “Beautiful B Physics at DO” |
|
Tuesday, October 12, 2004 Note Special Day |
Abaz Kryemadhi [Host: Bob Hirosky] | |
|
1:30 PM, Room 123 Note Special Time |
University of Indiana | |
| HEP Conference Room | “Lambda_c and Lambda_b Measurements From FOCUS and D0” |
| Wednesday, October 13, 2004 | Radu Marginean [Host: Bob Hirosky] | |
|
10:00 AM, Room 123 Note Special Time |
Ohio State | |
| HEP Conference Room | “A Neural Network Analysis of the Top Cross Section at CDF” |
| Wednesday, October 20, 2004 | Mike Longo [Host: Craig Dukes] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Michigan | |
| Physics Building | “A High Statistics Search for the Theta-plus Pentaquark” |
| There have been many reported sightings of exotic strange five-quark baryons in the past two years. Using the HyperCP dataset, which includes the largest K-short sample ever taken, we have searched for Theta-plus(1.54) -> K-zero + proton decays, with a spectrometer with excellent mass resolution. |
|
Friday, October 29, 2004 Note Special Day |
Rob Pisarski [Host: Hank Thacker] | |
|
12:00 PM, Room 313 Note Special Time |
Brookhaven National Lab | |
| Physics Building | “Gross-Witten Point and Deconfinement in Matrix Models” |
| Wednesday, November 3, 2004 | HyangKyu Park [Host: Hank Thacker] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Michigan | |
| Physics Building | “The Decay Σ+ → pµ+µ- and Possible New Physics from HyperCP” |
| The Fermilab HyperCP (E871) experiment collected on the order of 1010 hyperon decays in 1997 and 1999 runs. Using the entire data set, we will report on the observation of events with reconstructed masses consistent with that of Σ+ assuming the final state pµ+µ-. The observed events would be the rarest decay ever observed in the baryon sector. Possible interpretations of the observed events will be discussed. Finally we will present a speculation for a new physics scenario. |
|
Thursday, December 2, 2004 Note Special Day |
Matteo Palutan [Host: Sergio Conetti] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati | |
| Physics Building | “Recent Results From KLOE at DAFNE” |
| Recent results obtained by the KLOE experiment at the phi-factory DAFNE will be presented. They mainly concern neutral kaon physics including rare K_S decays, K_L lifetime and branching ratio's; a comprehensive discussion of the measurements that bear on the extraction of Vus will be given. The study of scalar and pseudoscalar meson production in radiative phi decays and the measurement of the e+e- hadronic cross section using the initial state radiation will also be reviewed. |
| Wednesday, December 8, 2004 | Christian Weiss [Host: Simonetta Liuti] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Jefferson Laboratory | |
| Physics Building | “3D Parton Imaging of the Nucleon in High Energy pp and pA Collisions” |
| Wednesday, January 19, 2005 | Vo Van Thuan [Host: P. Q. Hung] | |
|
2:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
Institute for Nuclear Science and Technology, Hanoi | |
| Physics Building | “Status of Nuclear Physics and High Energy Research in Vietnam” |
| Wednesday, January 26, 2005 | ***RESERVED** | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building | “**TBA**” |
| Wednesday, February 2, 2005 | AVAILABLE | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building | “TBA” |
| Wednesday, February 9, 2005 | AVAILABLE | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building | “TBA” |
| Wednesday, February 16, 2005 | AVAILABLE | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building | “TBA” |
| Wednesday, February 23, 2005 | AVAILABLE | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building | “TBA” |
| Wednesday, March 2, 2005 | David Smith [Host: Brad Cox] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | UVA | |
| Physics Building | “The Search for KL-> 2&pi 0&gamma” |
| The decay KL-> 2π 0γ is interesting as a probe of the sixth order of chiral perturbation theory. I am currently searching for this decay using data collected by the KTeV experiment in 1997. The decay is swamped by 3π0background events with one missing photon. Using Monte Carlo simulations of the two modes, I have designed cuts to eliminate this background while retaining signal events. The current upper limit on the decay is 5.6*10-6; my current single event sensitivity is 2.19*10-7 with only one background event remaining for one flux of data. I hope to extend this work to the 1999 data while retaining this low SES and background level. |
| Wednesday, March 9, 2005 | Chung-Wen Kau [Host: Blaine Norum] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | NCSU | |
| Physics Building | “Plan Polarizability and Chiral Effective Theory” |
| Wednesday, March 23, 2005 | E. Paschos [Host: Brad Cox] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Dortmund, Germany | |
| Physics Building | “Leptogenesis with Massive Neutrinos Abstract” |
| Leptogenesis provides an attractive first step for creating the Baryon Asymmetry in the Universe. The couplings of heavy Neutrinos contain, in general, Dirac and Majorana mass terms which break the CP symmetry. Their decays produce a lepton asymmetry which subsequently is converted into a baryon asymmetry. Models with this property and their implications for neutrino experiments and structure formation in the universe will be discussed. |
| Wednesday, March 30, 2005 | Tim Holmstron [Host: Craig Dukes] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building | “HAPPEX: Looking for Strange Quark Structure in the Nucleon” |
| Wednesday, April 6, 2005 | Bill Louis [Host: P.Q. Hung] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | LANL | |
| Physics Building | “Searching for Neutrino Oscillations: Early Results from MiniBooNE” |
| The MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab is designed to be a definitive test of the LSND evidence for neutrino oscillations. If the LSND evidence is confirmed, then, together with the results from solar, reactor, and atmospheric neutrino oscillation experiments, it would imply Physics Beyond the Standard Model, such as sterile neutrinos, CPT/Lorentz violation, or mass-varying neutrinos. After two and a half years of operation, MiniBooNE has collected about 500K neutrino events and is clearly observing charged-current quasi-elastic events, charged-current pion events, neutral-current pi0 events, and neutral-current elastic events. Some of these early, non-oscillation physics results will be presented along with the prospects for the future. |
|
Thursday, April 14, 2005 Note Special Day |
Nathanial Tagg [Host: Craig Dukes] | |
|
2:30 PM, Room 313 Note Special Time |
Oxford University | |
| Physics Building | “Neutrino Oscillations and the MINOS Experiment” |
| Neutrinos have started to gain enormous attention over the last 30 years because of strange properties that allow them to seemingly disappear when travelling long distances. I will give brief history of the important discoveries by neutrino experiments to put the newly-started MINOS experiment into context. MINOS is an experiment to produce neutrinos at Fermilab (near Chicago) and fire them undgeround to the Soudan lab (near Duluth), a baseline of 730km. The challenges of performing this long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment will be discussed. |
| Wednesday, April 27, 2005 | Saeed Ahmad [Host: Hank Thacker] | |
|
3:00 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
UVA | |
| Physics Building | “Study of CP(N) Models” |
| Wednesday, May 4, 2005 | Drew Baden [Host: Robert Hirosky] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Maryland | |
| Physics Building | “Status of the CMS Experiment” |
| Wednesday, August 24, 2005 | AVAILABLE | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, August 31, 2005 | AVAILABLE | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, October 12, 2005 | Manfred Paulini [Host: Craig Dukes] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Carnegie Mellon University | |
| Physics Building | “Recent B Physics Result from CDF” |
| We discuss selected heavy flavour physics results from the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) operating at the Run II Tevatron Collider at Fermilab. We focus on the search for particle-antiparticle oscillations in the system of neutral Bs0 mesons which is one of the high priority analyses of the CDF B physics program in Run II. |
| Wednesday, November 16, 2005 | Robert Michaels [Host: Donal Day] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, USA | |
| Physics Building | “208Pb Radius Experiment -- PREX” |
| The difference between the neutron radius Rn of a heavy nucleus and the proton radius Rp is believed to be several percent. This neutron skin has proven to be elusive to pin down experimentally in a rigorous fashion. The proposed Lead Radius Experiment PREX will measure the parity-violating electroweak asymmetry in the elastic scattering of polarized electrons from 208Pb at an energy of 850 MeV and a scattering angle of 6 degrees. Since the Z0 boson couples mainly to neutrons, this asymmetry provides a clean measurement of Rn with a projected experimental precision of ±1%. In addition to being a fundamental test of nuclear theory, a precise measurement of Rn pins down the density dependence of the symmetry energy of neutron rich nuclear matter which has impacts on neutron star structure and atomic parity violation experiments. |
| Wednesday, November 23, 2005 | ****THANKSGIVING BREAK**** | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, November 30, 2005 | Scott Ranson [Host: P.Q. Hung] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | NRAO | |
| Physics Building | “Using Exotic Pulsars to Probe Fundamental Physics” |
| Over the past several years, deep searches with the world's largest radio telescopes have uncovered several truly exotic pulsar systems. Observations of these objects using the incredibly precise techniques of pulsar timing, allow us to probe regimes of gravitational, electromagnetic, plasma, and particle physics that are impossible to reach in laboratories here on earth. In this talk I'll discuss several of the most interesting recent discoveries and show how they are onstraining gravitational theories, plasma physics, and the physics of matter at supranuclear densities. |
| Wednesday, January 18, 2006 | Vladimir Pascalutsa [Host: Cole Smith] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | The College of William and Mary /Jefferson Lab - Theory Group | |
| Physics Building | “Chiral Effective-Field Theory in the Resonance Region” |
| I will discuss the chiral effective-field theory of QCD can be extended to the Delta-resonance energy region. This framework will then be applied to the pion electroproduction, radiative pion electroproduction, and Compton scattering with the aim of a model-independent study of the Delta-resonance properties. These results will be contrasted with the state-of-the-art lattice QCD studies. |
| Wednesday, February 1, 2006 | Rodney Crewther [Host: P.Q. Hung] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Adelaide | |
| Physics Building | “Axion Phenomenology” |
| The best explanation for the lack of CP violation by strong interactions involves the existence of axions: light, weakly interacting spin-0 particles. The PVLAS experiment, hep-ex/0507107, reports seeing a rotation of the polarization of 0.1 W laser light in a transverse magnetic field consistent with having an axion but with an extremely large (unlikely?) ratio of electromagnetic to color anomalies. JLab's FEL Axion group plans to use its 10 kW free-electron laser to provide a rigorous check on the PVLAS result and to look for photon regeneration due to propagating axions. I will review the reasons for having axions and explain why experiments of this type are so important. |
| Wednesday, March 1, 2006 | RESERVED [Host: JKG] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | UVA | |
| Physics Building | “TO BE ANNOUNCED” |
| Wednesday, March 8, 2006 | ****SPRING RECESS**** | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, March 15, 2006 | Matthew Wingate [Host: Hank Thacker] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Washington | |
| Physics Building | “Accurate Lattice Calculations for Quark Flavor Physics” |
| Lattice QCD calculations now include the effects of 2 light sea quarks and 1 strange sea quark through the use of an improved staggered fermion action; consequently, calculations important to quark flavor physics are free of the unsystematic errors that infected previous calculations. Furthermore, the work of the previous decade to reduce discretization errors, to tame lattice perturbation theory, to control light quark mass extrapolations, and to implement heavy lattice quarks is finally converging to yield realistic, accurate calculations. In this talk I discuss some important recent innovations we employ, show tests of the methodology, and present our current results. I conclude by showing the impact of the results on constraints of Standard Model parameters and by mapping the route for further improvement. |
| Wednesday, April 5, 2006 | Roy Briere [Host: Dinko Počanić] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Carnegie Mellon University | |
| Physics Building | “Charm Physics from CLEO-c” |
| The CLEO-c physics program includes studies of D(s) mesons and charmonium. Precision results are of interest for weak flavor physics, including verification of lattice QCD. Many results for D0 and D+ are already available, and Ds data taking has begun recently. Charmonium data and the energy scan used to find a Ds running point offer QCD and spectroscopy results as well. I will introduce the CLEO-c program, and illustrate its impact with a selection of recent results and future plans. |
| Wednesday, April 12, 2006 | Mehrdad Adibzadeh [Host: Hank Thacker] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | UVA | |
| Physics Building | “Models of Neutrino Masses in Extra Dimensions” |
| Wednesday, April 19, 2006 | Jeff Nelson [Host: Craig Dukes] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | William & Mary | |
| Physics Building | “First MINOS Results from the NuMI Neutrino Beam” |
| The Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment recently completed its first year of exposure to the NuMI neutrino beam. In this run muon neutrinos produced at Fermilab near Chicago were directed 734.3km through the Earth to the 5,400 ton MINOS far detector located a half mile underground in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in northern Minnesota. This talk will describe the performance of the NuMI neutrino and the MINOS detectors during this initial run and will include presentation of preliminary data from this initial data run. |
| Wednesday, April 26, 2006 | Patrick Keith-Hynes [Host: Hank Thacker] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | UVA | |
| Physics Building | “Hairpin Diagrams and the Planar Equivalence of One-Flavor QCD and N=1 Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theory” |
| Wednesday, May 3, 2006 | Yaogang Lian [Host: Hank Thacker] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | UVA | |
| Physics Building | “Small Instantons in CP1 and CP2 Sigma Models ” |
| Wednesday, September 20, 2006 | Andrew J. Norman [Host: E. Craig Dukes] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Virginia | |
| Physics Building | “Hadronic Particle Production and the Future of Neutrino Physics” |
|
Thursday, October 12, 2006 Note Special Day |
Stefan Gruenendahl [Host: E. Craig Dukes] | |
|
4:00 PM, Room 313 Note Special Time |
Fermilab | |
| Physics Building | “The Dark Energy Survey” |
| Wednesday, October 25, 2006 | Qinghai Wang [Host: Paul Fendley] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Unversity of Connecticut | |
| Physics Building | “Worldline Instantons and Pair Production” |
| The imaginary part of the QED effective action can be approximated by the contribution of a worldline instanton, a solution to the classical Euclidean worldline equations of motion. In this talk, I will briefly review this formalism and compute also the prefactor arising from quantum fluctuations about this classical path. I will show the excellent agreement between our semiclassical approximation, conventional WKB, and numerical results using numerical worldline loops. I will also show the extension of the worldline instanton technique to multidimensional spatially inhomogeneous electric background fields, for which, WKB failed to apply. |
| Wednesday, November 8, 2006 | Patrick Toale [Host: E. Craig Dukes] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Penn State | |
| Physics Building | “IceCube: A Cubic Kilometer Neutrino Telescope” |
| The IceCube neutrino telescope, located deep in the glacial ice at the geographic South Pole, is the worlds largest neutrino observatory. The primary goal of IceCube is the detection of high energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin. In its second year of construction, IceCube now includes its predecessor, AMANDA. This talk will cover the science goals, design, and construction of IceCube, along with recent results from AMANDA. |
| Wednesday, November 22, 2006 | Thanksgiving Recess [Host: N/A] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | N/A | |
| Physics Building | “N/A” |
| Wednesday, December 13, 2006 | Reading Day | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | N/A | |
| Physics Building | “N/A” |
| Wednesday, January 17, 2007 | Lisa Everett [Host: Peter Arnold] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Univeristy of Wisconsin | |
| Physics Building | “Cabibbo Haze in Lepton Mixing” |
| Wednesday, January 24, 2007 | Duncan Brown [Host: Bob Hirosky] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Texas, Arlington | |
| Physics Building | “Recent QCD Measurements at D-Zero” |
| Wednesday, January 31, 2007 | Caglar Dogan [Host: E. Craig Dukes] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Virginia | |
| Physics Building | “Bulk Viscosity of High Temperature QCD” |
| The data obtained from RHIC experiments is reproduced pretty well by ideal hydrodynarnical models. However, the first corrections to perfect fluid behavior are also important in interpreting the data and are characterized by shear and bulk viscosities, I will explain the perturbative calculation of the bulk viscosity of high-temperature QCD using kinetic theory to leading order in the coupling constant. This fills a gap in the literature since even a parametric estimate of this quantity was absent prior to OUT work. Although it may not be justified to apply our results to the strongly coupled plasma produced at RHIC, we hope that they will at least provide the right order of magnitude. |
| Wednesday, February 21, 2007 | Daniel Cronin-Hennessy [Host: E. Craig Dukes] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Minnesota | |
| Physics Building | “CLEO-c: A New Frontier of Weak and Strong Interactions” |
| The Cornell Electron-positron Storage Ring (CESR) upgrade has provided a high luminosity dataset in the charm threshold region. Among the goals of the CLEO-c experiment are precision measurements of charm leptonic and semileptonic decay rates. These data are used to confront lattice-QCD predictions for hadronic decay constants and form factors. Validation of lattice-QCD will allow for improved CKM constraints. I will overview the goals of the CLEO-c ecxperiment and report recent progress. |
| Wednesday, February 28, 2007 | Steffen Strauch [Host: Simonetta Liuti] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of South Carolina | |
| Physics Building | “Polarization Transfer in 4He(e,e'p): Is the Ratio G_Ep/G_Mp Modified in the Nuclear Medium?” |
| Wednesday, March 28, 2007 | Pieter Mumm [Host: Blaine Norum] | |
|
3:45 PM, Room 204 Note Special Time |
NIST | |
| Physics Building | “Testing Time Reversal Invariance in Neutron Beta Decay” |
| Neutron beta decay is the simplest of all nuclear beta decay. Its simplicity allows properties of neutron decay to be related directly to the weak coupling constants and thus precision measurements of neutron decay correlations and lifetime offer both sensitive checks of the Electroweak Standard Model as well as excellent probes of new physics. One question of intense interest is the nature of the observed baryon-antibaryon asymmetry of the universe. In this talk I will focus on a sensitive search for new time reversal invariance violating physics which offers the potential of illuminating this mystery. |
| Wednesday, April 4, 2007 | Alexandr Yelnikov [Host: Peter Arnold] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Virginia Tech | |
| Physics Building | “Hamiltonian approach to Yang-Mills theories in 2+1 dimensions: glueball and meson mass spectra” |
| Wednesday, April 11, 2007 | Po-Shan Leang [Host: E. Craig Dukes] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Virginia | |
| Physics Building | “Non-Abelian Plasma Instabilities” |
| Wednesday, April 18, 2007 | Petar Maksimovic [Host: Brad Cox] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | John Hopkins University | |
| Physics Building | “Discovery of Σb” |
| In recent months, the Tevatron reached a significant milestone
and delivered over one fb-1 to both the D0 and CDF experiments. The
large sample of data and a powerful displaced vertex trigger
combine to give CDF the world’s largest sample of fully
reconstructed Λb0s. Using this sample, we observe four new
Λb0 π |
| Wednesday, May 2, 2007 | David Phillips [Host: E. Craig Dukes] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Virginia | |
| Physics Building | “The search for K L 0 -> π 0 π 0 μ + μ - and K L L -> π 0 μ + μ - ” |
| Although the neutral kaon system has been researched many times in the past, it still remains a vital tool for decisive studies on CP violation and for probing into new physics. The KTeV experiment has played a crucial role in these endeavors with an intense source of high energy kaon decays coupled with a high precision detector. Currently, there's no published calculation inside the Standard Model for Br(K L 0 -> π 0 π 0 μ + μ - ), although the decay is possible via a virtual photon or a 'possible' new neutral boson X 0 , which was recently observed by the HyperCP Experiment in the decay Σ + -> pX 0 -> p μ + μ - . The decay K L L -> π 0 μ + μ - is also an intriguing study since it contains a direct CP violating parameter. I shall report on the progress made in analyzing these two decays. |
| Wednesday, August 29, 2007 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, September 5, 2007 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, September 12, 2007 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, September 19, 2007 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, September 26, 2007 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, October 3, 2007 | Milind V. Purohit [Host: E. Craig Dukes] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | South Carolina | |
| Physics Building | “Evidence for D0-D0bar Mixing” |
| Wednesday, October 10, 2007 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, October 17, 2007 | Dmitri Tsybychev [Host: Bob Hirosky] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Stony Brook | |
| Physics Building | “Results on mixing, Δ Γ s and related CP violation in B s meson system at Tevatron” |
| The CDF and D0 experiments have collected large samples of hadronic and semileptonic decays of B s mesons. We present the latest results from the Tevatron on the measurement of mixing parameter Δ m s and the width difference between B H s and B L s and the latest results on indirect CP violation in the B s meson system. |
| Wednesday, October 24, 2007 | Kaustubh Agashe [Host: Bob Hirosky] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Maryland | |
| Physics Building | “Signals for Composite Higgs models in top/W/Z physics” |
| In the first part of the seminar, I will briefly review how the idea of the Higgs boson being a composite particle of new strong dynamics can explain the hierarchy between the Planck and weak scales and how quarks and leptons being partially composite accounts for their basic structure as well. I will argue that the largest experimental signals for such a scenario arise in the top/W/Z sectors. Remarkably, this scenario might have a dual and more useful description in terms of a warped higher dimensional spacetime. So, in the second part of the seminar, I will focus on computing signals for such composite Higgs models at the upcoming Large Hadron Collider using the extra dimensional description. Specifically, I will consider detection of the excitations (called Kaluza-Klein modes) of the gluon and graviton in the extra dimension. |
| Wednesday, October 31, 2007 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, November 7, 2007 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, November 14, 2007 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, November 28, 2007 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, December 5, 2007 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, December 12, 2007 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, January 16, 2008 | RESERVED | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, January 23, 2008 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, January 30, 2008 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, February 6, 2008 | Jim Linnemann [Host: Bob Hirosky] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Michigan State University | |
| Physics Building | “How Statistics Just Might Improve Your Experiment” |
| I report on two topics presented at the PHYSTAT 2007 conference at CERN. 1) Event weighting has long been used, but is typically maligned (under the rubric of the "method of moments") as statistically inefficient (producing parameter estimates with worse uncertainty) compared to maximum likelihood fitting. However, event weighting is quite fast, requiring only one pass through the data with no iteration. Further, it has fairly recently been understood that the choice of weight function has a substantial effect on the errors, and by choosing to minimize the parameter error via calculus of variations, near-ideal uncertainty can result. 2) Evaluation of systematic errors in MC is a tedious fact of life; it's slow. We have for generations done it one variable at a time. However, it turns out that doing so makes us blind to certain systematic effects--even when the systematic errors themselves are uncorrelated. And it also turns out that statisticians knew about this since the 1920's. I'll show what our method blinds us to. |
| Wednesday, February 13, 2008 | RESERVED | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, February 20, 2008 | Reserved for Colloquium | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, February 27, 2008 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, March 12, 2008 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, March 19, 2008 | Patrice Verdier [Host: Bob Hirosky] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | IPN-Lyon | |
| Physics Building | “Searches for New Physics at the Tevatron” |
| Wednesday, March 26, 2008 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, April 2, 2008 | Michael Balazs [Host: Bob Hirosky] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Virginia | |
| Physics Building | “Search for Evidence of Neutralinos at the LHC” |
| Wednesday, April 9, 2008 | RESERVED | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, April 16, 2008 | Enrico Lunghi [Host: Bob Hirosky ] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Fermilab | |
| Physics Building | “Light charged Higgs at the beginning of the LHC era” |
| I will review the experimental evidence and theoretical biases that point to physics beyond the Standard Model. In the context of realistic supersymmetric models, I will explore in detail some interesting theoretical issues and investigate whether existing experimental constraints still allow for a light extended Higgs sector. Predictions at Tevatron and LHC in such scenarios are explored. |
| Wednesday, April 23, 2008 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, May 7, 2008 | Huicheng Guo [Host: Bob Hirosky] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Virginia | |
| Physics Building | “Leptogenesis in a model of dark energy and dark matter” |
| Wednesday, August 27, 2008 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, September 3, 2008 | Brandon Parks [Host: Chris Neu] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Ohio State University | |
| Physics Building | “Search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson at CDF Run II” |
| One of the greatest theoretical triumphs in the history of physics has been the unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces. This theory successfully predicted the masses of the W and Z bosons which were later measured at CERN, and involves a mechanism that provides all particles with mass. This mechanism also predicts the existence of another observable particle, known as the Higgs boson. Experiments at the LEP collider have placed a lower bound on its mass of 114 Gev/c2, but direct measurement of the Higgs has thus far eluded all efforts. Currently, the CDF and D0 experiments at Fermilab are pushing to probe the mass regions not excluded by LEP with a number of analyses optimized for masses extending from 100 to 200 GeV/c2. Near the LEP boundary where the Higgs is expected to decay primarily to a pair of bottom quarks, the most promising channels involve Higgs produced in association with a W or Z boson. In particular, the ZH modes have very interesting properties which can be taken advantage of at the analysis level. The mode in which the Z decays to electrons or muons is extremely "clean", as leptons from vector boson decay are typically well measured and all final state particles are directly reconstructed. Conversely, the mode in which the Z decays to neutrinos is extremely challenging, as the presence of the Z can only be inferred from momentum imbalance provided by recoil with the Higgs. Utilizing new analysis techniques developed to isolate a Higgs signal amongst its seemingly overwhelming backgrounds, no significant excess of signal has currently been observed. However, limits have been set on the production cross section of a Higgs boson. Currently, limits of 16 times the standard model expectation has been set in the ZH->llbb mode, and 8 times the standard model expectation in the ZH->vvbb mode for a Higgs mass of 115 GeV/c2. Combining these results with all low mass analyses at CDF and D0, the Tevatron has placed a limit of 3.7 times the standard model expectation directly above LEP's lower mass limit. |
| Wednesday, September 10, 2008 | RESERVED | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, September 17, 2008 | Kate Scholberg [Host: Craig Dukes] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Duke University | |
| Physics Building | “The CLEAR Experiment: Measuring Neutrino-Nucleus Coherent Scattering at the Spallation Neutron Source” |
| A low-threshold neutrino scattering experiment at a high intensity stopped-pion neutrino source has the potential to measure coherent neutral current neutrino-nucleus elastic scattering. This process has never been observed and presents opportunities for new tests of the Standard Model. A promising prospect for the measurement of this process is a proposed noble-liquid-based experiment called CLEAR (Coherent Low Energy A(Nuclear) Recoils), at the Spallation Neutron Source. This talk will describe the CLEAR experiment and its physics reach. |
| Wednesday, September 24, 2008 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, October 1, 2008 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, October 8, 2008 | Luke Corwin [Host: Chris Neu] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Ohio State University | |
| Physics Building | “Measuring Fully Leptonic Charged B Decays in the Recoil of Semileptonic B Decays at BaBar” |
| After a brief review of the theoretical predictions and experimental difficulties presented by fully leptonic charged B decays, I will review the latest search for charged B decays into lepton neutrino pairs, where the lepton can be an electron, muon, or tau, in the recoil of a semileptonically decaying charged B. This search uses the full data set collected at the BaBar experiment. |
| Wednesday, October 15, 2008 | Viktor Veszpremi [Host: Christopher Neu] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 120 | Cornell University | |
| Physics Building | “Search for new physics with b-quark jets” |
| The new energy regime and higher data-taking rate of the LHC will soon extend the possibilities of searches for yet undiscovered particles and phenomena. Final states produced via b-quark decays are often created by physics beyond the standard model; they are also favored in light standard model Higgs boson processes. High-pt B-tagging, therefore, has been and continues to be one of the most important tools in searches both at the Tevatron and at the LHC. In the first half of my presentation, I will introduce the CMS pixel detector, a component of the CMS tracking system that is vital for B-tagging, and talk about the on-going calibration efforts in its commissioning. In the second half of my presentation, I will demonstrate the use of B-tagging in physics analyses through an example of a low-mass standard model Higgs boson search perfomed in the CDF experiment at the Tevatron. |
| Wednesday, October 22, 2008 | Virginia Azzolini [Host: Chris Neu] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | IFIC-University of Valencia | |
| Physics Building | “Study of Charmless Inclusive Semileptonic B Decays and Measurement of the CKM Matrix Element |Vub| with the BaBar Detector” |
| The determination of the element |Vub| of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) quark-mixing matrix plays a central role in the search for flavour and CP violation beyond the Standard Model. In this seminar, we will present measurements of partial branching fractions for inclusive charmless semileptonic decays, B -> Xu l nu, in limited regions of phase space and the corresponding values of |Vub|, as extracted using several theoretical calculations. The invariant mass of the hadronic system, Mx, the squared invariant mass of the lepton pair, q2, and the variable P+ = Ex-|Px|, or one of their combinations, in the process B -> Xu l nu are used as discriminating variables to suppress semileptonic decays with charm. Partial branching fractions are measured as functions of the cuts on the above variables. Different theoretical models are used to compute acceptances and related uncertainties, thereby allowing to extract |Vub|. > These studies are performed on a sample of 383 million BB events collected at the Υ(4S) resonance, with the BaBar detector at the PEP-II e+e- storage rings |
|
Monday, October 27, 2008 Note Special Day |
Amihay Hanany [Host: Diana Vaman] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 313 | Imperial College | |
| Physics Building | “Brane Tilings, CS Theories, and M2 Branes” |
|
Tuesday, October 28, 2008 Note Special Day |
Jason Slaunwhite [Host: Chris Neu] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Ohio State University | |
| Physics Building | “Search for Higgs Bosons Produced in Association with W Bosons at CDF” |
| The Higgs boson is a result of electroweak symmetry breaking in the Standard Model. The Higgs is experimentally unobserved, despite the Standard Model's prediction of it's existence. We present a search for a Standard Model Higgs bosons produced in association with a W bosons in proton anti-proton collisions recorded at CDF. Our search uses a dataset corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2.7/fb. Our candidate events have one high-momentum muon or electron, missing ET, and a Higgs that decays to a pair of b-quarks jets. We extended the reach of the search by including events without a triggered lepton. We employ several b-quark identification algorithms to enhance the purity of Higgs events. An Artificial Neural Network improves our discrimination of Higgs signal kinematics from background processes such as top pair production and W+jets. We perform a likelihood fit of the neural network output distribution and set 95% confidence level upper limit on the associated production cross section times branching ratio as a function of Higgs mass. |
| Wednesday, November 5, 2008 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, November 12, 2008 | Tom Schwarz [Host: Chris Neu ] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Univ. of California-Davis | |
| Physics Building | “Top Production at the Tevatron” |
| I will present the latest results from CDF in the study of top quark production. A little over a decade after the discovery of the Top quark the Tevatron has now produced over 10 times the statistics of the first experiment . Because of this, we are finally now able to precisely test the top quarks place in the Standard Model. In the same amount of time it took to collect this data, measurement techniques have advanced at a similar pace. I will discuss two new state-of-the-art measurements with the latest data of the top quark cross section. These new measurements are the first to reach the precision of the theoretical cross-section, and have managed to resolve a long-standing discrepency between previous measurements. In addtion, a new measurement, the forward backward asymmetry is discussed. The measurement is a test of discrete symmetries at very high energy, which has recently received a sizable amount of attention because of an unexpectedly large measured value. |
|
Thursday, November 13, 2008 Note Special Day |
Pelin Kurt [Host: Chris Neu] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 123 | Kurkova University | |
| HEP Building | “Jet Shapes Studies at CMS” |
| The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) detector will observe high transverse momentum jets produced in the final state of proton-proton collisions at the center of mass energy of 14 TeV. These data will allow us to measure jet shapes, defined as the fractional transverse momentum distribution as a function of the distance from the jet axis. Since jet shapes are sensitive to parton showering processes they provide a good test of Monte Carlo event simulation programs. A potential method was investigated to measure jet shapes in CMS using reconstructed calorimeter energies where the statistics of all distributions correspond to a CMS data set with 10 pb -1 of integrated luminosity. We compare the predictions of the Monte Carlo generators PYTHIA and HERWIG++. |
| Wednesday, November 19, 2008 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, December 3, 2008 | Michael Kirby [Host: Chris Neu] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | Northwestern University | |
| Physics Building | “Standard Model Higgs Searches with D0 in RunII” |
| The Higgs boson is the last missing particle within the Standard Model of particle physics and the largest focus of research efforts at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. The combination of the searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson at a center-of-mass energy of sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV using up to 4 fb^-1 of data collected with the D0 detector will be presented. The major contributing processes include associated production (WH->l+nu+b+b, ZH->nu+nu+b+b, ZH->l+l+b+b, and WH->WWW^(*)) and gluon fusion (gg->H->WW^(*)). The significant improvements across the full mass range resulting from the larger data sets, improved analyses and inclusion of additional channels are discussed. The prospects for expanding the Higgs sensitivity region though the end of Tevatron operation will also be discussed. |
| Wednesday, January 14, 2009 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, January 21, 2009 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, January 28, 2009 | Zhayou Yang [Host: Chris Neu] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room HEP 123 | Carleton University | |
| Physics Building | “LAr calorimeter commissioning and search for a light stop” |
| Extensive tests have been carried out with the ATLAS liquid argon( LAr) calorimeter system. This talk presents the highlights of the LAr commissioning activities. Supersymmetry searches at ATLAS are summarized, with a focus on the search for a light supersymmetric top squark (stop). A light stop is motivated by theories of electroweak baryogenesis in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). An MSSM benchmark point, LST1, with a stop mass of 150 GeV is investigated for potential discovery with the ATLAS detector. |
|
Monday, February 2, 2009 Note Special Day |
W.S. Hou [Host: PQ Hung] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | National Taiwan University | |
| Physics Building | “CP Violation for the Heaven and the Earth - - - Sighting the 4th Generation?” |
| Wednesday, February 4, 2009 | Reserved for Condensed Matter Seminar | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, February 11, 2009 | Ernest Aguilo [Host: Chris Neu] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 123 | York University | |
| HEP Building | “Single Top Searches at Dzero” |
| Great improvements have been made since the evidence of single top quark production at DZero in 2006 with 1 fb-1 of data. Here I present the signal and background modeling, event selection, multivariate techniques and statistical tools for the measurement of the cross section using 2.3 fb-1 of data. |
| Wednesday, February 18, 2009 | Sarah Boutle [Host: Chris Neu] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 123 | University College London, ZEUS | |
| HEP Building | “Beauty in photoproduction at HERA” |
| I will present a recent ZEUS measurement of beauty photoproduction in dijet events at HERA. In the analysis, b-quark events are identified in the semi-leptonic decay mode using a technique which exploits the long lifetime of the B hadron. This is the first measurement of its kind at ZEUS as it uses the Micro-Vertex Detector (MVD), an upgrade made to ZEUS for the HERA II running period. I will describe the analysis method involved in the measurement and then present the results which include beauty production cross sections as well as dijet correlations. The results are compared to QCD predictions and previous measurements. |
| Wednesday, February 25, 2009 | Available | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, March 11, 2009 | Carolina Deluca [Host: Chris Neu] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 123 | IFAE - CDF | |
| HEP | “Measurement of the Inclusive Isolated Prompt Photon Cross Section at CDF” |
| I present results on the measurement of the inclusive direct photon production cross section in proton-antiproton collisions at #sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV, using data collected with the upgraded Collider Detector at Fermilab in Run II, and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2.5 fb-1. Measurements are performed as a function of the photon transverse momentum for photons with pT > 30 GeV and |eta| < 1.0. Photons are required to be isolated in the calorimeter (isolation ET < 2 GeV). We use the calorimeter isolation distribution to estimate the contamination from jets faking isolated photons. The measured cross section is corrected back to the hadron level and compared to NLO pQCD predictions. The NLO pQCD predictions include non-perturbative corrections. We find good agreement between data and the theoretical predictions. |
| Wednesday, March 18, 2009 | Daniel Duggan [Host: Chris Neu] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 123 | Florida State University - D0 | |
| HEP | “Recent results of the photon plus heavy flavor jet cross sections at D0” |
| Photons produced in association with heavy flavor quarks provide a unique window into both the sea quark content of the proton and the splitting of gluons into heavy flavor quark pairs. A new combination of experimental techniques at the Tevatron has provided the basis for the first measurements of the differential photon plus heavy flavor jet production cross sections at 1.96 TeV. Results of these measurements and comparisons to next-to-leading order theoretical predictions will be presented. |
| Wednesday, March 25, 2009 | Hella Snoek [Host: Chris Neu] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 123 | University of Amsterdam/NIKHEF - BaBar | |
| HEP | “Observation of the rare charmed B decay, Bd to D*+ a0-, at the BaBar experiment: On finding a needle in a haystack.” |
| A general introduction is presented into the field of B-meson physics, the BaBar experiment, and the motivation for the branching ratio measurement of the B-meson decay Bd->D*a0. The branching ratio of this decay is sensitive to non-factorizing terms of QCD factorization, which is generally used to calculate the amplitudes of meson decays. Second, this decay can be extremely sensitive to the CKM-angle gamma, the least accurately known angle of the CKM Unitarity Triangle. An experimental challenge of this measurement is posed by the low expected branching ratio of the decay (order 10-6), in combination with the high background levels from related B-meson decays. The analysis uses more than 30 selection variables and an unbinned likelihood fit performed simultaneously in three observables. The optimization procedure of the data selection and the setup of the likelihood fit are presented in the talk. The both promising and remarkable results of the branching ratio measurement are discussed. |
| Wednesday, April 1, 2009 | Zongchang Yang [Host: Chris Neu] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 123 | Peking University - CMS | |
| HEP | “J/ ψ Production Studies in CMS” |
| When the LHC starts its operation, it will produce large number of charm quarks even in low luminosity runs during the first few years of running. With precision tracking and nearly complete muon coverage, the CMS detector is well suited to the study of quarkonium through its di-muon decays. We report the methods and plans for measuring the differential p T J/ ψ → μ+μ− production cross section, using data to be collected in the first LHC run by the CMS detector. |
| Wednesday, April 8, 2009 | Reserved for Atomic Seminar | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, April 15, 2009 | RESERVED | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | ||
| Physics Building |
| Wednesday, April 22, 2009 | Shannon Zelitch [Host: Bob Hirosky] | |
| 3:30 PM, Room 204 | University of Virginia | |
| Physics Building | “H->WW*->mu+nu+j+j : A Single Channel's Search for the Higgs at the Tevatron” |
| Wednesday, April 22, 2009 | O. Pfister,C. Sackett, K. Williams, S. Wolf [Host: Mike Timmins] | |
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7:00 PM, Room 203 Note Special Time |
University of Virginia | |
| Physics Building | “Lasers” |
| The 15th annual physics demonstration sow will be held Wednesday evening, April 22nd, 2009 in room 203 of the physics building at the University of Virginia to celebrate National Physics Day. This highly anticipated event is a special family oriented physics demonstration show for the general public. The show this year will be at 7:00 p.m. in the physics building on McCormick Road. Parking is available in the parking garage on Emmett Street, or after 5:00 p.m. in the football stadium parking lots. Physics professors Olivier Pfister, Cass Sackett, Keith Williams, Stuart Wolf and Mike Timmins will delight the crowd with strange and mystifying events. When the laser was first invented in 1958, it was immediately considered a “solution waiting for a problem”. Well, that was a long time ago and we have since found many problems that the laser is a perfect solution for. In fact, lasers are ubiquitous in everyday modern electronics from simple pointing instruments to cd/dvd players. However, lasers are even more useful to researchers and after this show, you will begin understand why. The demonstrations are designed to intrigue and excite both young and old from novice to expert. Bring your family and friends, but come on time as the room fills up quickly. For more information about this free public event, call 924-3781. |
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