| Seminar Date: | Tuesday, January 21, 2014 |
| Time: | 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM |
| Location: | KAVLI 3rd Floor Conference Room |
| Abstract: | The Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) will be a multifaceted 1300 km baseline neutrino beam experiment between Fermilab and SURF (Sanford Underground Research Facility). LBNE plans to study neutrino and anti-neutrino oscillations in detail, in the hopes of determining the nature of the neutrino mass hierarchy and measuring the CP violating phase. The broad physics program of LBNE will also include supernova neutrinos, atmospheric neutrinos, and proton decay. In this talk, I focus on new work performed on the subtleties of the underlying physics of the ionization and scintillation yields of the liquid argon which comprises the TPC (time projection chamber) to be deployed at SURF. I will discuss the dependence of these yields on the particle type, energy or dE/dx, and drift electric field magnitude in the context of the new NEST-based (Noble Element Simulation Technique) physics model, applicable to any noble element detector, and detail a simulated application, the discrimination of electrons and gammas in the detector. |
| Speaker: | Matthew Szydagis - UC Davis
 Matthew Szydagis received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 2010. His advisor was Juan Collar and he worked on the COUPP (Chicagoland Observatory for Underground Particle Physics) direct WIMP dark matter detection experiment, for which he constructed a 15 kg windowless bubble chamber. Since then he is known for his development of the NEST (Noble Element Simulation Technique) model for understanding the physics underlying charge and light production in noble-element-based detectors, especially TPCs. He currently works on the LUX and LZ liquid-xenon-based dark matter experiments, in addition to LBNE and CAPTAIN.
|