| Seminar Date: | Thursday, January 24, 2013 |
| Time: | 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM |
| Location: | Madrone |
| Abstract: | Electrons, Muons and Neutrinos have played, and will continue to play, a central role in particle physics discoveries. Both experimentally and theoretically, leptonic interactions facilitate access to some of the rarest processes and tests of Nature's most enduring symmetries. New initiatives in this domain form a critical component of Physics at the Intensity Frontier, addressing puzzles about the highest energy scales and the earliest moments in the evolution of the universe. In this talk, I will describe three separate initiatives that search for new physics via symmetry violation. The EXO-200 experiment is testing lepton number conservation by searching for neutrinoless double-beta decay of Xe-136. The Mu2e experiment is being built to test charged lepton flavor conservation by searching for neutrinoless conversion of muons to electrons in the field a nucleus. The MOLLER experiment has been proposed to search for tiny deviations in the ultra-precise prediction for the amount of parity nonconservation in electron-electron scattering. |
| Speaker: | Krishna Kumar - University of Massachusetts
 Professor Kumar earned his Ph.D. in 1990 from Syracuse University, then took a postdoc at Harvard on the L3 experiment. He moved on to faculty positions at Princeton and UMass, where he has worked at the boundary of nuclear and particle physics, and been involved with many low-energy experiments. Particular interests include: beyond the Standard Model searches; tests of fundamental symmetries & conservation laws; neutral weak interactions; weak structure of hadrons; proton spin structure; and precision tests of low energy QCD.
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