Tuesday September 1
Tae Min Hong
University of California, Santa Barbara
Looking for patterns in B-meson decays with baryons at BaBar
Tuesday September 22 at 1:40pm
Tom Schwarz
University of California, Davis
Top Quark Production at the Tevatron (slides pdf)
The Tevatron has now produced over 10 times the statistics since the
discovery of the Top quark over a decade ago. During this time,
measurement techniques have advanced at a rapid pace. The large
statistics collected and new advanced methods allow us to finally test
the top quark's place in the Standard Model. I will present the
state-of-the-art in measuring top quark production, which includes the
two most precise measurements of the top quark cross section in the
world. I will also present the combined top quark cross section for
several measurements in all channels at CDF. The result is the most
precise determination of the rate of top quark production to date. In
addtion to discussing the top cross section, I present a measurement
of the forward backward asymmetry in top production. This measurement
is a test of discrete symmetries at very high energy, which has
recently received a sizable amount of attention because of an
unexpectedly large measured value.
Tuesday September 29 at 1:40pm
Sarah Eno
University of Maryland
Early searches for exotic physics, beyond the standard model, with CMS (slides pdf)
The LHC is scheduled to commence running this fall, and should at
sometime during the run become the world's new high-energy frontier.
Many models of physics beyond the standard model, such as those with
extra dimensions, can produce spectacular "exotic" signatures with
large rates that could be detected with even a small amount of
high-energy data. In this talk, I discuss preparations and projected
reach for these searches from the CMS collaboration for the upcoming
run.
Tuesday October 6 at 1:40pm
Eva Halkiadakis
Rutgers University
Direct measurement of the W boson production charge asymmetry at CDF (slides pdf)
I will present the first direct measurement of the W production charge asymmetry as a function of the W boson
rapidity y_W in p-pbar collisions at the Tevatron. I use a sample of W->e nu events in data from 1 fb-1 of
integrated luminosity collected using the CDF II detector. In the region | y_W | < 3.0, this measurement is capable
of constraining the ratio of up- and down-quark momentum distributions in the proton more directly than in previous
measurements of the asymmetry that are functions of the charged-lepton pseudorapidity.
Tuesday October 13 at 1:40pm
Gustaaf Brooijmans
Columbia University
Breaking the Electroweak Barrier: Novel Signatures at Hadron Colliders (pdf slides)
The search for physics beyond the standard model will be the main focus
of the experiments at the LHC. We have precious little information on
the nature of any new physics however, and will need to explore a large
variety of signatures in our exploration of the multi-TeV energy domain.
One interesting possibility is that new physics will manifest itself
in the decays of heavy objects to top quarks or W and Z bosons. This
will lead to novel experimental signatures which will be discussed in
this seminar.
Tuesday October 27 at 3:30pm in A8 (colloquium)
Evelyn Thomson
University of Pennsylvania
Smashing particles at the High Energy Frontier (pdf slides)
Experimental particle physics seeks to understand the fundamental
particles and interactions of the universe. I will present the status
and future prospects of experimental knowledge for two of these
particles: the top quark, the most massive fundamental particle with
approximately the same mass as a gold nucleus comprised of 200
nucleons; and the Higgs boson, the most elusive particle as it has
evaded detection for over forty years! The results that I will present
are based on analysis of data from the current run of the
CDF experiment at Fermilab, which began in 2001 and is expected to
continue through 2010. In order to produce massive particles like the
top quark, Einstein's famous relation E=mc2 tells us that a lot of
energy is needed. Therefore, a beam of protons is accelerated to close
to the speed of light and then brought into collision with another
equally energetic beam moving in the opposite direction. These
collisions occur 1.7 million times per second, and I will discuss how
the debris from these collisions is examined for clues about the
properties of particles like the top quark and the Higgs boson.
The prospects for the future are dominated by the next generation
CERN Large Hadron Collider, located near Geneva in Switzerland, which
will reach collision energies up to seven times higher than the
Fermilab Tevatron. In preparation for the first year-long run of the
Large Hadron Collider beginning in November 2009, I will also describe
the commissioning of the Transition Radiation Tracker, an important
part of the giant ATLAS experiment. The Transition Radiation Tracker
is essentially a camera with 350,000 channels that takes 75
nano-second long snap-shots of the trajectories of electrically
charged particles. The radius-of-curvature of a charged particle's
trajectory in a strong magnetic field allows determination of the
particle's momentum, while the 100 times brighter signal from
transition radiation allows partial discrimination of the least
massive charged particle, the electron, from other more massive
charged particles.
Tuesday November 17 at 1:40pm
Paul Sorensen
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Recent results with the STAR detector at RHIC
Tuesday November 24 at 1:40pm
Justin Keung
University of Pennsylvania
Search for WZ in the lvbb final state at CDF
Tuesday December 1 at 1:40pm
Valerie Halyo
Princeton University
TBA
Tuesday December 8 at 1:40pm
Gabriel Orebi Gann
University of Pennsylvania
New results from SNO
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