Conveners
Cosmic Physics: SuperCDMS/NEXUS
- Samuel McDermott ()
Cosmic Physics: Dark Matter
- Dylan Temples (Northwestern University)
Cosmic Physics: Theory/CMB
- Kirit Karkare ()
Cosmic Physics: Dark Energy
- Dan Hooper (Fermilab)
Cosmic Physics: Computational/Simulation Methods in Astrophysics and Cosmology
- Anastasia Sokolenko (HEPHY)
SuperCDMS is a dark matter (DM) search experiment under construction inside the SNOLAB facility (Lively, Canada). The experiment will employ two types of germanium- and silicon-based cryogenic calorimetric detectors to detect ionization and phonon signals from DM particle direct interactions. The detectors will be operated in a new radiopure cryostat and shield. In this talk, I will present...
The Northwestern Experimental Underground Site (NEXUS), located in the MINOS cavern at Fermilab, is a user facility for development and calibration of cryogenic detectors. The heart of NEXUS is a dilution refrigerator with a 10 mK base temperature, protected from radiogenic backgrounds by a moveable lead shield and 100 meters of rock overburden. The fridge is outfitted with cabling to support...
The Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) employs silicon and germanium calorimeters equipped with transition edge sensors to directly search for interactions from dark matter (DM). New 1-gram SuperCDMS HVeV (high-voltage with eV resolution) devices exhibit single-charge sensitivity, making it possible to search for sub-GeV-mass DM candidates such as electron-recoiling DM, dark...
Superconducting qubits are of interest for the development of quantum computers and for quantum sensing in experiments such as dark matter searches. For both applications, it is crucial to understand qubit errors and the resulting performance limitations. Recent studies of charge noise and relaxation errors in a multiqubit device found significant spatial correlation of errors across the...
The axion is a very well-motivated Dark Matter candidate in the $\mu$eV mass range. Its discovery would also solve the longstanding question why the electric dipole moment of the neutron is vanishingly small, $< 10^{-26} e$cm, so far consistent with zero. ADMX searches for axion dark matter via its resonant conversion to photons inside a strong (7.6T) magnetic field using RF cavities. In this...
The DarkSide program is a direct WIMP dark matter search experiment using liquid argon time projection chamber (LAr-TPC). Its primary detector, DarkSide-50, run since 2015 a 50-kg-active-mass LAr-TPC filled with low radioactivity argon from underground source and produced world-class results for both the low mass (M_WIMP < 10 GeV/c2) and high mass (> 100 GeV/c2) WIMP search. The next stage of...
In recent years, the demand for experimental data in cosmology, direct searches for dark matter and neutrino physics has highlighted the need to explore very low energy interactions. While Charge-Coupled Devices have proven their worth in a wide variety of fields, its readout noise has been the main limitation when using these detectors to measure small signals. The R&D done at Fermilab...
Pulsars - spinning neutron stars that are magnetized – are likely the leading source which could explain the large excess in the observed positron flux present in data measurements from the AMS-01, HEAT, and PAMELA collaborations. While first thought to be from a source of annihilating dark matter, there have since been more compelling observations - via experiments such as HAWC - of TeV halos...
Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background have revolutionized cosmology and established ΛCDM as the standard model describing the contents and evolution of the universe. Higher precision measurements of the CMB temperature and polarization anisotropy will continue to probe high energy physics on scales inaccessible in laboratories. These include the effective number of relativistic...
Using hundreds of millions of galaxies in the largest galaxy catalog ever produced, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) has placed stringent constraints on the composition of the universe and the growth of large-scale structure. I will give an overview of the experiment and how we use the images we capture to further our understanding of cosmology, with an emphasis on the recent results from the...
Strong lensing is a powerful probe into the mass distributions—and the evolutionary histories—of galaxies and galaxy clusters. However, in studies using strong lenses to probe galaxy structure, we need to assess whether strong lenses are representative of the general galaxy population or they form a biased subsample. We carry out an investigation into selection biases potentially present in a...
We present ongoing work to automate and accelerate parameter estimation of galaxy-galaxy lenses using simulation-based inference (SBI) and machine learning methods.
Current cosmological galaxy surveys, like the Dark Energy Survey (DES), are predicted to discover thousands of galaxy-scale strong lenses, while future surveys, like the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will find hundreds...
The physics community lacks user-friendly computational tools for constructing simple simulated datasets for benchmarking and education in machine learning and computer vision. We introduce the python library DeepBench, which generates highly reproducible datasets at varying levels of complexity, size, and content focused on a cosmological context. DeepBench produces both highly simplified...
From Chess to Telescopes: Using reinforcement learning to automate the observation scheduling process
The size, complexity, and duration of telescope surveys are growing beyond the capacity of traditional methods for scheduling pointings and observations. Scheduling algorithms must have the capacity to balance multiple, often competing, observational and scientific goals, address both...