Meetings & Workshops
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OCT
24
Tuesday
Nuclear Physics Seminar
"To CME or not to CME? Implications of recent charge separation measurements in p(d)+Au, Au(Cu)+Au and U+U collisions for the chiral magnetic effect in heavy ion collisions"
Presented by Roy Lacey, Stony Brook University
11 am, Small Seminar Room, Bldg. 510
Tuesday, October 24, 2017, 11:00 am
Hosted by: 'Bjoern Schenke'
The observation of charge separation induced by the Chiral Magnetic Effect (CME), could provide crucial insights on anomalous transport and the interplay of chiral symmetry restoration, axial anomaly, and gluonic topology in the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) produced in heavy ion collisions. I will discuss recent differential charge separation measurements,for p(d)+Au, Au(Cu)+Au and U+U, with a correlator specifically designed to give discernible responses to CME-driven charge separation and non-CME backgrounds. Measurements which span the beam energy range Root_s = 19.5 - 200 GeV will be presented. The d(p)+Au results are observed to be consistent with the reduced magnetic field strength and the essentially random B-field orientations expected in these collisions. In contrast, the Au(Cu)+Au and U+U measurements validate the presence of CME-driven charge separation quantified by the Fourier dipole coefficient a1. Ongoing attempts for CME-signal quantification, as well as implications for the upcoming RHIC isobar run, will be discussed as well.
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NOV
2
Thursday
Particle Physics Seminar
"UCNtau: A magneto-gravitational trap measurement of the free neutron lifetime"
Presented by Robert Pattie, Los Alamos National Laboratory
3 pm, Small Seminar Room, Bldg. 510
Thursday, November 2, 2017, 3:00 pm
Hosted by: ''Xin Qian''
The neutron is the simplest nuclear system that can be used to probe the structure of the weak interaction and search for physics Beyond the Standard Model. Measurements of neutron ?-decay observables are sensitive to scalar and tensor interactions in the weak force which are not present in the Standard Model. The lifetime of the neutron ?n is an important parameter for Big-Bang Nucleo-synthesis models, solar fusion models, and absolute neutrino scattering cross-sections, and can be used to test the unitarity of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa quark mixing matrix. Presently, the two typical methods used to measure the neutron lifetime, cold neutron beam measurements and stored ultracold neutron (UCN) measurements, disagree by roughly 4?. This discrepancy motivates the need for new measurements with complementary systematic uncertainties to previous efforts. The UCN? experiment uses an asymmetric magneto-gravitational UCN trap with in situ counting of surviving neutrons to measure the neutron lifetime. Previous bottle experiments confined UCN in a material storage vessel creating a significant correction due to losses resulting from the material UCN interactions. The magnetic and gravitational confinement of the UCN minimizes losses due to material interactions. Additionally, UCN? uses a detection system that is lowered into the storage volume which avoids emptying the surviving UCN into an external detector. This minimizes any possible transport related systematics. This in situ detector also enables counting at various heights in the vessel, which provides information on the trapped UCN energy spectrum, quasi-bound orbits, and possible phase space evolution. I will present the physics motivation for precision neutron physics, a description of the UCN? experiment, the results of data collected during the 2016-2017 accelerator cycle which resulted in a value of τn=877.7±(0.7) stat (+0.3/−0.1) sys in agreement with previous material bottle
