New Perspectives 2014

9 Jun 2014, 08:00 → 10 Jun 2014, 18:00 US/Central

1 West (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)

Anne Norrick (The College of William and Mary), David Martinez (Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas), Jesus Orduna (Rice University), Louise Suter (Argonne National Laboratory), Michelle Mesquita de Medeiros (Federal University of Goias)

Conference where undergraduate, graduate students, and young postdocs have the opportunity to present their work by giving talks or presenting posters.
Organized by the Fermilab Student and Postdoc Association, this conference serves as a preamble for the annual Fermilab Users Meeting and has grown to be a highlight of Fermilab's conference program by providing students with a great opportunity to gain experience and learn from their peers.
Talks are presented in a 12+3 min. format.

Monday, 9 June

10:00 Registration and Coffee

Session 1

Conveners: Mr David Martinez (Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas), Dr Jesus Orduna (Rice University)

1 Welcome

Speaker: Anne Norrick (The College of William and Mary)

Slides NewPerspectives.pdf

2 Dynamical Stability of Slip-stacking

Slip-stacking is an accelerator configuration that has been used at Fermilab to nearly double proton intensity since 2004. Our analysis provides a new look at the dynamics, calculating for the first time the stable-phase space area and the injection efficiency as a function of aspect ratio. We also find the first complete perturbative solutions and parametric resonances from slip-stacking. We've also shown that is directly corresponds to the driven pendulum and may have applications for standing-wave traps used in optical and acoustic physics.

Slides NP_JEldred.pdf

3 Dielectric Lined Waveguides for Dynamical Beam Control

Dielectric lined waveguides (DLW) are capable of driving large (GV/m acceleration gradients). In this talk we discuss new applications of DLW's in low energy electron sources and discuss the resulting largely flexible scheme to produce coherent THz light.

Speaker: Francois Lemery (NIU Accelerator Physics)

Slides DynamicBeamControl.pdf DynamicBeamControl.pptx

4 Improving HF GFlash Simulations at CMS

Until now GFlash Simulations at CMS are used for studying electron and pion plus electromagnetic showers in the pseudorapidity range 3<$eta$<5. It has been proved that GFlash Simulations are 15% faster than Shower Library Simulations and that they have a better agreement with experimental data. Our attempt is to make our simulations run two times faster and enhance them for a larger range of pseudorapidity. So in the first step in our work we need to be sure there is a linear relation between the incoming energy of the electron/pion and the response in our photomultipliers detectors. We found that for both of them the response is linear, so now we are able to forward in enhancing our program.

Speaker: Eduardo Ibarra García Padilla (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)

Slides New_Perspectives_2014.pdf

11:50 Lunch

Session 2

Conveners: Dr Louise Suter (Argonne), Ms Michelle Mesquita de Medeiros (Federal University of Goias)

5 Testing and Assembly of the High Density Interconnect Circuits for the CMS Forward Pixel Detector Upgrade

The CMS pixel detector is the innermost component of the all-silicon tracking system located closest to the interaction point. The foreseen increase of the instantaneous and integrated luminosities at the LHC necessitate an upgrade of the pixel detector in order to maintain the excellent tracking performance of the CMS detector. The main new features of the upgraded pixel detector would be ultra-light mechanical design with four barrel layers and three end-caps on either side of the interaction region, and a digital readout chip with higher rate capability and a new cooling system. The forward pixel detector will have 672 detector modules with 44 million pixels of the size 100 x 150 micrometers. The modules consist of silicon sensors bumb-bonded to readout chips. A high-density-interconnect (HDI) circuit is glued on top of the sensor and is wire-bonded to 2x8 array of readout chips. HDI provide signal and power distribution for the readout circuitry. The group from SUNY at Buffalo group is responsible for the detailed testing and assembly of the HDIs at Fermilab. The talk will present our contribution to the testing and assembly of the HDI circuit boards.

Speaker: Andrew Godshalk (SUNY at Buffalo)

Slides 2014-06-09_HDI_New_Perspectives_Talk.pdf

6 The MINERvA experiment

MINERvA (Main INjector Experiment for v-A) is a neutrino scattering experiment in Fermilab's NuMI high-intensity neutrino beam. MINERvA was designed to make precision measurements of low energy neutrino and antineutrino cross section on a variety of materials including plastic scintillator, C, Fe, Pb, He and water. An overview of the experiment and a description of the detector will be presented.

Speaker: Mr David Martinez (Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas)

Slides new_perspectives_talk_2014.pdf

7 Quasi-elastic neutrino scattering at MINERvA

Charged-current quasi-elastic (CCQE) scattering from heavy nuclei is an important signal channel for neutrino oscillation experiments. Last year, MINERvA published its first CCQE cross-section distributions. Our results, and those of other experiments, suggest that we do not currently have a complete model that accurately predicts all of the complex interactions occurring within the nucleus. I will show a comparison of our cross-section data with the predictions of various nuclear models, and also explain how calculating a double-differential cross-section will help us to determine which models best match our data.

Speaker: Ms Cheryl Patrick (Northwestern University)

Slides NewPerspectives14_CPatrick_CCQE.pdf

8 Charged kaon production at MINERvA

Supersymmetric Grand Unified Theories predict proton decay with $p \rightarrow K^{+}\bar{\nu}$ as the dominant channel. Backgrounds arise from $K^{+}$ production by atmospheric neutrinos where other final-state particles are not detected. MINERvA identifies $K^{+}$ events by reconstructing the time difference between the kaon and its decay products, and expects to be able to constrain the rate of such neutrino-induced backgrounds. The current status of this analysis is presented.

Speaker: Chris Marshall (University of Rochester)

Slides chris_NewPerspectives_20140609.pdf

14:50 Coffee Break

Session 3

Conveners: Anne Norrick (The College of William and Mary), Dr Jesus Orduna (Rice University)

9 The Mu2e Experiment at Fermilab

The mu2e experiment at Fermilab will search for interesting phisycs by looking for an incredibly rare phenomenon: a muon -which is basically an electron's fatter cousin- converting, in a Cinderella-like transformation, into its more slender and well-known relative, the electron.

Speaker: Dr Jesus Orduna (Rice University)

Slides orduna_06092014_New_Perspectives.pdf

10 Two Higgs Doublet Model (2HDM) search projections for high-luminosity LHC

Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN is presently undergoing necessary upgrades for the high energy run of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine foreseen in Year 2015. The higher center-of-mass energy and high luminosity will offer precision measurements of the recently discovered Higgs boson as well as an enhanced sensitivity for the New Physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). There are many natural extensions of SM which predict the existence of additional heavy Higgs-like scalars. Two Higgs Doublet Model is a generic way of describing such extensions with extended Higgs sector. We explore the potential of future analyses to exclude or discover heavy, neutral Higgs bosons in the context of models with two Higgs doublets. The production of a heavy scalar H boson and pseudo-scalar A boson through gluon fusion, with subsequent decay H→ZZ→4l and A→Zh→llbb (l=e, μ), is considered. The sensitivity of these analyses is assessed for a dataset consisting of an integrated luminosity of 3000 fb^{-1} of proton-proton collisions at √s = 14 TeV center-of-mass energy, collected with an average of 140 pileup interactions per bunch crossing.

Speaker: Dr Nitish Dhingra (Brown University, USA)

Slides NitishDhingra_NewPerspectives2014.pdf

11 Measurement of the Lambda_b cross section

The Lambda_b differential production cross section are measured as functions of their corresponding transverse momentum and rapidity in proton-proton collisions as centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV using data collected by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Measurements are based on Lambda_b reconstructed decays in the J/psi meson and Lambda^0 baryon final state where the J/psi decays into an opposite charged muon pair and Lambda_0 decays into a proton and a pion meson. This work uses a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.9/fb.

Speaker: Hector Moreno (University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez)

Slides HM_New_Persp..pdf

12 Measurement of electroweak vector boson pair productions in pp collision at CMS detector, LHC.

We present an overview of measurements of electroweak vector boson pair production, decaying to semileptonic and fully leptonic final states. The data analysed were taken at centre of mass energy of 7 & 8 TeV by the CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The cross-section measurements are important because they are a test of the Standard Model predictions, while the processes serve as a background for Higgs searches and various other processes.

Speaker: Mr Ajay Kumar (University of Delhi)

Slides Users_Meeting_Talk.pdf

Tuesday, 10 June

Elevator Pitch Open Session

12:00 Lunch

Session 4

Convener: Dr Jesus Orduna (Rice University)

13 Phenomenology of MaVaN’s Models in Reactor and Solar Neutrino Data

Mass Varying Neutrinos (MaVaN's) mechanisms were proposed to link the neutrino mass scale with the dark energy density, addressing the coincidence problem. In some scenarios this mass can present a dependence on the baryonic density felt by neutrinos, creating an effective neutrino mass that depends both on the neutrino and baryonic densities. In this work we study the phenomenological consequence of MaVaN's scenarios in which the matter density dependence is induced by Yukawa interactions of a light neutral scalar particle which couples to neutrinos and matter. Under the assumption of one mass scale dominance, we perform an analysis of KamLAND neutrino data which depends on 4 parameters: the two standard oscillation parameters, $\Delta m^{2}_{0,21}$ and $tan^{2}\theta_{12}$, and two new coefficients which parameterize the environment dependence of neutrino mass. We introduce an Earth's crust model to compute precisely the density in each point along the neutrino trajectory. We show that this new description of density does not affect the analysis with the Standard Model case. With the MaVaN model we observe a first order effect in lower density, which lead to an improvement on the data description. We will also present new results with solar data.

Speaker: Mr Mateus Carneiro (CBPF)

Slides New_Perspectives_2014.pdf

14 LArIAT - testing and simulating the light readout system on the way towards light - augmented calorimteric reconstruction and PID.

With the ongoing construction, commissioning and proposals of new detectors and intensive R&D efforts, liquid argon Time Projection Chambers (TPCs) are starting to become a crucial technology in the US neutrino program. Their scope of use in the near and more distant future covers such urgent problems in weak interaction physics as the search for sterile neutrinos, the neutrino mass hierarchy or CP violation in the neutrino sector. If they are to be resolved, precise measurements are inevitable. To make them possible, the technology has to be calibrated in a controlled environment. As an answer to this demand, the LArIAT test beam experiment will operate the former ArgoNeuT LAr TPC in the Fermilab Testbeam Facility (FTBF). The detection capabilities of the chamber will be enhanced by a photomultiplier - based light readout system, composed of standard and high quantum efficiency PMTs, as well as SIPMs and tha wavegength shifter covering walls. This novel approach to the light detection in LArTPCs will aim to implement a Dark Matter search-like system in order to use the scintillation light to augment the particle identification algorithms and a calorimetric reconstruction. To optimize its performance, detailed studies of light collection were performed using the improved version of the LArSOFT software package. The results of these simulation, including among others the necessary coverage of the TPB wavelength shifter on the full chamber walls as well as the light yield uniformity study will be presented. To assure the proper hardware functioning, before commissioning of the full detector, the PMT setup was tested in a small chamber at the University of Chicago. The results of these tests, also outlined in this talk, were then used to validate and refine simulations of the full detector.

Speaker: Pawel Kryczynski (Fermilab)

Slides new-perspectives2014-kry-talk.pdf

15 Searching for Sterile Neutrinos with MINOS

MINOS is a two-detector on-axis experiment based at Fermilab. The NuMI neutrino beam encounters the MINOS Near Detector 1 km downstream before travelling 734 km through the Earth's crust, to reach the Far Detector located at the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Northern Minnesota. By searching for oscillations driven by a large mass splitting, MINOS is sensitive to the existence of sterile neutrinos. This talk will present results of a search for sterile neutrinos that is sensitive to the parameter space suggested by LSND and MiniBooNE. Both charged current numu and neutral current neutrino interactions are analysed in a 3+1 model. This MINOS search for numu disappearance complements other previous experimental searches for sterile neutrinos in the nue appearance channel

Speaker: Mr Ashley Timmons (University of Manchester)

Slides Sterile_Neutrino_New_Prospctives.pdf

16 An Overview of the FPIX Detector--CMS Experiment

Speaker: Mr Conett Huerta Escamilla (University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez)

Slides FPIX_CHE_v2.0.pptx

An Overview of the FPIX Detector – CMS Experiment
Huerta-Escamilla, Conett ^1
1 University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez

Corresponding Author: conett.huerta@upr.edu
 

The Upgraded CMS experiment at CERN will explore physics at the high energy frontier in the 2015 run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The CMS pixel detector is the first component to interact with the particles created in the collision; therefore, a hardware upgrade is necessary to maintain tracking performance in light of the increased order of magnitude of the luminosity. The silicon detector system is currently being upgraded to function properly at the high energy frontier - we will discuss an overview and description of the work being done on the Forward Pixel (FPIX) detector upgrade. Although pixelated silicon detector technology is mature, there is an ongoing effort to go from the initial R&D to a stable production operation. In this effort, it is important to address issues that contribute to increased noise and an increased uncertainty in calibration, which, as a consequence, increase transverse momentum measurement smearing. A deep understanding of issues in the hardware development phase will be of great use to data interpretation and understanding the physics in the 2015 increased luminosity and energy LHC run.
 

15:00 Coffee Break

Session 5

Conveners: Dr Louise Suter (Argonne), Ms Michelle Mesquita de Medeiros (Federal University of Goias)

17 g-2 Overview

The measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon provides a test of the standard model and a handle on physics beyond the standard model. A new experiment at Fermilab has been proposed to resolve the current discrepancy of 3 sigma between theory and experiment. The principles, history and current experimental progress will be discussed in this presentation.

Speaker: Dr Mandy Rominsky (Fermilab)

Slides mrominsky_np2014.pdf

18 Electron Neutrino Appearance in NOvA

NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment optimized for electron neutrino appearance. It consists of two functionally identical, nearly fully-active liquid-scintillator tracking calorimeters. The Near Detector (ND) at FNAL will be used to study the neutrino beam spectrum and composition before oscillation, and measure background rate to the electron neutrino appearance search. The Far Detector, 810 km away in Northern Minnesota, will observe the oscillated beam and will be used for extraction of oscillation parameters. In this talk, I will describe a technique used for selecting electron neutrino interaction events in NOvA and give a brief overview of the complete electron neutrino oscillation analysis.

Speaker: Ms Kanika Sachdev (University of Minnesota)

Slides new_perpectives_2014.pdf

19 Muon Neutrino Disappearance at NOvA

NOvA consists of two highly active, finely segmented, liquid scintillator detectors located 14 mrad off Fermilab's NuMI beam axis, a Near Detector located at Fermilab and a Far Detector located 810 km from the beam target. The NOvA long-baseline neutrino experiment will be sensitive to the muon neutrino disappearance parameters sin^2(theta_23) and delta m^2_(32), enabling the potential determination of the theta_23 octant.I will present the progress towards the final instrumentation of the NOvA Near Detector and its importance to utilize the full potential of the NOvA experiment by extrapolating the measured neutrino energy spectrum in the Near Detector to give a prediction of the unoscillated energy spectrum in the Far Detector.

Speaker: Dr Louise Suter (Argonne)

Slides New_perspectrives_suter.pdf

20 Final Recap of New Perspectives

Speaker: Dr Louise Suter (Argonne)

Slides New_prespectives_overview.pdf