UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy PhD Defense Sean Hunt "Helium Burning of 22Ne: Targets, Detectors, and Initial Measurements" Half of all heavy elements are produced in stellar environments through the nucleosynthetic s-process. The s-process takes place in asymptotic giant branch stars … Read more
UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy PhD Defense Andrew L. Cooper "A Low-Energy Study of the 20Ne(proton,gamma)21Na Reaction with High-Current Proton Beams at LENA" The neon-sodium (NeNa) cycle is believed to play a pivotal role in explaining the oxygen-sodium abundance anticorrelation exhibited … Read more
UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Gökce Basar, University of Illinois, Chicago "Going with the flow: making the path integral more complex" The theory of strong interactions (Quantum Chromo Dynamics, or QCD), which describes how the constituents of protons and neutrons … Read more
UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Chalk Talk Gökce Basar, University of Illinois, Chicago "Non-Perturbative approaches to strongly interacting systems" I will provide an overview of the outstanding problems, from my perspective, of the physics of strongly interacting systems, with an emphasis … Read more
UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Walter Pettus, University of Washington "Weighing a Ghost: The Quest to Measure the Neutrino Mass" The ghostly neutrinos remain the only fundamental fermions whose masses are unknown. Neutrino oscillation measurements definitively demonstrate neutrinos have mass, … Read more
UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Chalk Talk Walter Pettus, University of Washington "Backwards is Better: Next-Generation Detectors for Nuclear Physics" The neutrino continues to conceal many of its fundamental properties, rebuffing the advances of modern physics. When our best isn’t good … Read more
UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Graham Giovanetti, Princeton University "Searching for dark matter with liquid argon" The DarkSide collaboration has undertaken a staged program using argon time projection chambers (TPCs) to search for dark matter. I will introduce DarkSide-50, a … Read more
UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Chalk Talk Graham Giovanetti, Princeton University "Development of low-background detectors for future rare-event searches" Physics beyond the Standard Model may be accessible to novel, ultra low-background detectors that push the frontiers of experimental sensitivity. Two such … Read more
UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy PhD Defense Andrew Loheac “Computational techniques to address the sign problem in non-relativistic quantum thermodynamics” Understanding quantum many-body physics is crucial to physical systems throughout condensed matter, high-energy, and nuclear physics, as well as the development … Read more
UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Danielle Speller, Yale University "Low Temperature Searches for Physics Beyond the Standard Model" The standard model of particle physics provides a useful framework for understanding the known particles and their interactions, and heavily informs our … Read more