I am on my way home to #Canada from #Vienna. Currently on a short layover in #Frankfurt.
#Vienna was wonderful and the #TAUP2023 conference was amazing. Attached is a photo from the conference dinner, held in the city hall. It was a remarkable venue for dinner.
The current age of #GravitationalWave astronomy is breathtaking. The next age will be mind blowing. Between #LISA and at least one large-scale ground-based #Laser #Interferometer, plus the #Pulsar Network and #Cosmic #Microwave #Background approaches, there will be coverage from the Planck scale/birth of the universe to the merging of #Sueprmassive #BlackHoles and even #Supernova explosions.
Had a great time presenting the #HALO Collaboration poster on a preliminary look at neutron multiplicity in "bursts" in our detector. A burst is a sequence of neutrons (3 or more) that lie within 3ms. Had great conversations with the people that stopped by the poster session today.
Check out the poster:
The XVIII International Conference on Topics in Astoparticle and Underground Physics (TAUP2023) is organized by the Institute of High Energy Physics (HEPHY) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna, the Technische Universität Wien, the University of Innsbruck and the Comenius University Bratislava.The biennial TAUP series covers recent experimental and theoretical developments in astroparticle physics by invited plenary review talks, parallel workshop sessions of invited...
See this session for details: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1199289/sessions/490454/#20230830
The XVIII International Conference on Topics in Astoparticle and Underground Physics (TAUP2023) is organized by the Institute of High Energy Physics (HEPHY) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna, the Technische Universität Wien, the University of Innsbruck and the Comenius University Bratislava.The biennial TAUP series covers recent experimental and theoretical developments in astroparticle physics by invited plenary review talks, parallel workshop sessions of invited...
I am really excited about the effort from experiments like #ANAIS and #COSINUS to definitely understand the "quenching factor" of sodium iodide crystals.
NaI has appeared in many experiments, and increasingly in #darkmatter experiments. The QF relates energy in electrons (usually what you see in an experiment) to the energy of the original nuclear recoil. The QF is essential to proper interpretation of experiments using NaI.
Learn more about the #CMB (cosmic microwave background):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background
What don’t we know yet about the CMB?
1. Does it have polarizations (e.g. “B-mode”) embedded in it that are imprinted from the birth of the universe?
2. Does the distortion of the CMB light, due to traveling past and through matter in the recent universe, provide a clear map of the large scale evolution of the cosmos? What is that evolution?
Learn a little about the #neutrino
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino
What don’t we know yet?
1. Whether there are just 3 neutrinos.
2. Any of the neutrino masses.
3. What kind of fermion is the neutrino? Is it “Dirac” type, just like all the other fermions? Or is it “Majorana”? (which would be a first for a fundamental subatomic particle)
4. Do neutrinos, like quarks, also violate fundamental symmetries?
Lessons from the #TAUP conference:
1. The fundamental nature of the #neutrino, as a #fermion, is a crucial goal … and one that continues to prove challenging.
2. The cosmic microwave background (#CMB) has at least two big questions left, and they are hard: what is the polar structure of the light itself, and what can gravitational microlensing of that light tell us about large-scale structure of the more recent universe?
Stephen Sekula
Jodi Cooley
