Conveners
Session 3
- Ritoban Basu Thakur (Fermilab/ UIUC)
Matthew Wiesner
31/05/2011, 13:50
Cosmic Frontier
In this presentation, we describe a study of ten strong gravitational lenses. A gravitational lens is a mass distribution which causes the deflection of light from a more distant astronomical source, sometimes forming a ring or an arc visible in space. In this case, all of the lenses are clusters of galaxies. These lensing systems were discovered in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey by the Sloan...
Walter Pettus
31/05/2011, 14:10
Cosmic Frontier
DM-Ice is a new direct detection dark matter experiment planned for deployment deep in the South Pole ice underneath the IceCube Neutrino Telescope. This detector will consist of approximately 250-kg of NaI(Tl) scintillating crystals and will have sensitivity to testing the expected annual modulation in the dark matter signal. Following the results of DAMA/LIBRA and preliminary findings of...
Nachiketa Chakraborty
31/05/2011, 14:30
Cosmic Frontier
The primordial abundances of light elements form an important evidence of the Big Bang Model of the universe. With precise measurements of the baryon-to-photon ratio, η from WMAP, these final abundances, which are functions of η alone in general, are fixed and must be consistent. As a result, any discrepancy between the theoretical and observational abundances of these elements, as exists for...
Ellen Klein
31/05/2011, 14:50
Intensity Frontier
ArgoNeuT, a 170 liter Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) neutrino detector, recently collected thousands of neutrino events in the NuMI beam line at Fermilab. After a brief introduction to the experiment, progress on the reconstruction and analysis will be discussed. Candidate neutrino events and future LArTPC experiments will also be presented.
Yuri Oksuzian
31/05/2011, 15:10
Intensity Frontier
The proposed Mu2e experiment aims to search for neutrino-less muon to electron conversion with sensitivity improved by three orders of magnitude relative to previous experiments. To achieve this goal, Mu2e needs to obtain a cosmic ray veto efficiency of better than 99.9%. We report the preliminary results of recent R&D efforts for three-layer plastic scintillator veto system. The results are...
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Martina Cancelo
(Batavia High School)
31/05/2011, 15:30
Cosmic Frontier
Neu-Rad is an experiment to investigate the recently observed variations in isotope decay rates correlated with the earth-sun distance and solar flares. Isotope decay rates will be observed near high flux neutrino sources with energies similar to what is observed from the sun such as the nuclear reactor facility in Rio De Janerio, Brasil. Isotope decay rates will also be measured at the...