Physics at the University of Virginia
Academics People Research Announcements Facilities Administration Classes
High Energy Physics Seminar History

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 ”


Joint Nuclear/High Energy
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”


Special High Energy Seminar
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”


Special High Energy Seminar
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”


Joint Nuclear - High Energy Seminar
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”
ABSTRACT:
 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.


Special Nuclear/HEP Seminar
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”


Joint Nuclear/High Energy
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”


SPECIAL HIGH ENERGY SEMINAR
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”


Monday, June 12, 2000
Note Special Day
Professor Tatsuya Nakada [Host: Brad Cox]
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 ]
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”


Special Physics/Astronomy
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”


Special High Energy Seminar
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”


Joint Nuclear/High Energy
Wednesday, November 7, 2001 Raju Venugopalan [Host: S. Liuti]
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”
ABSTRACT:
 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]
3:00 PM, Room 204
Note Special Time
UVA
Physics Building “Mesoscopic QCD and the Theta-Vacua”
ABSTRACT:
 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)”
ABSTRACT:
  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.


PLEASE NOTE SPECIAL TIME
Wednesday, February 19, 2003 Adam Lewandowski [Host: Donal Day]
3:30 PM, Room 204 Johns Hopkins
Physics Building “Running with the Radius in RS1”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
 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.


Special Nuclear and High Energy
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”
ABSTRACT:
 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.


Please note special room and time
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”
ABSTRACT:
 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.


SPECIAL HIGH ENERGY SEMINAR. Please note day and time!!
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”
ABSTRACT:
 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-”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
 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.


Joint with High Energy/Nuclear
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”


See Suzie Garrett
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
ABSTRACT:
 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”
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”
ABSTRACT:
 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.


*Please note special date, time, and location.
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”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
 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.


Joint Nuclear/High Energy Seminar
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”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
 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.


This is a joint Nuclear-High Energy seminar
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”
ABSTRACT:
 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.


Special High Energy Seminar
Wednesday, February 1, 2006 Rodney Crewther [Host: P.Q. Hung]
3:30 PM, Room 204 University of Adelaide
Physics Building “Axion Phenomenology”
ABSTRACT:
 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


Joint Nuclear/High Energy Physics Seminar
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”
ABSTRACT:
  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”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
  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.


Nuclear/Particle Seminar
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?”


Special Colloquium
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”
ABSTRACT:
 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
ABSTRACT:
 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+/- resononances, consistent with the hypothesis of the lowest-lying Σb* baryon states.


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 -
ABSTRACT:
  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”
ABSTRACT:
 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”
ABSTRACT:
 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