Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Annual Meeting of the Four Corners Section of the APS
Volume 59, Number 11
Friday–Saturday, October 17–18, 2014; Orem, Utah
Session B3: Particle Physics I |
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Chair: Paul Weber, Utah Valley University Room: Science Building 139 |
Friday, October 17, 2014 10:15AM - 10:39AM |
B3.00001: The current experimental view of neutrino oscillations Invited Speaker: Eric Zimmerman The past fifteen years have seen a revolution in our understanding of the properties of the neutrino. A large set of experiments has observed two oscillation modes, indicating that there are three distinct mass states. In the last few years, a third oscillation mode has been discovered, opening up future probes of new phenomena including CP violation. Despite the recent progress, however, much remains unknown about neutrinos and several experimental results remain difficult to reconcile with the simplest models. This talk will give an overview of what is known, what we're learning in this exciting era of measurements, and what we may be able to learn in the next decade and beyond. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 17, 2014 10:39AM - 10:51AM |
B3.00002: CC Incl. Cross-section on Carbon in the T2K near detector Paul Rojas, Norm Buchanan The Tokai-To-Kamioka (T2K) experiment is a long baseline neutrino experiment for the purpose of studying neutrino oscillations. A neutrino beam is sent, from Tokai, 295 km west across Japan arriving at the far detector in Kamioka (Super-K); with a near detector (ND280) at Tokai 280m from the beam source. I will present my work on measuring a charged current inclusive neutrino interaction cross-section on carbon using the scintillation bars in the Pi-Zero Detector (P0D) portion of ND280. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 17, 2014 10:51AM - 11:03AM |
B3.00003: Photon Detector Prototyping and Testing for LBNE Matthew Judah, Norm Buchanan, Ryan Wasserman The Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) is an experiment currently proposed for construction, which is designed to investigate neutrino oscillations, over a wide range of neutrino energies. The Far Detector, located in the Homestake mine in South Dakota, will consist of both a Time Projection Chamber and a photon detector. The main challenge with photon detection in the LBNE far detector is that the detection medium is liquid argon, which emits 128 nm scintillation photons. To be detected these photons need to be converted to optical wavelengths ($\sim$ 400 nm) while maintaining a detection efficiency sufficient to meet the experimental design goals. I will describe the R{\&}D effort currently underway to address this challenge. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 17, 2014 11:03AM - 11:15AM |
B3.00004: Photon Detector Modeling for LBNE Dylan Adams, Ryan Wasserman, Norm Buchanan CSU has played a very active role in developing, prototyping and testing potential photon detection systems for the far detector in the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE). The photon detectors will be housed in liquid argon, which gives off scintillation light at 128 nm. As available silicon photomultipliers (SiPM's) are mainly sensitive to optical light and not to deep UV wavelengths, light guides are coated/doped with wavelength shifting materials, such as TPB, to convert the scintillation light in argon (128 nm) to visible wavelengths. Using modeling techniques in Geant4, a ``Monte Carlo toolkit,'' the various photon detector geometries being considered for the far detector can be compared in terms of geometric efficiencies. Various optical curves and other details used to model the different geometries will be presented, as well as comparisons between experimental data and simulated data from natural cosmic rays creating scintillation light in the 40L test dewar at CSU. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 17, 2014 11:15AM - 11:27AM |
B3.00005: Subluminal artifacts in the search for UHECR at TA Nathan Waugh The Telescope Array (TA) experiment in western Utah searches for ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECR), which are particles of extraterrestrial origin with energies of 10$^{\mathrm{18}}$ eV or more. These particles are ultra-relativistic nuclei that, on interaction with Earth's atmosphere, create showers of relativistic daughter particles. These showers should progress through the atmosphere with speeds near c, and observations so far confirm this expectation. However, velocity fits to detector data can return subluminal cases, which are expected to result from finite detector resolution and event misreconstructions. We have developed an event quality measure that can estimate the statistical significance of these slower-than-c cases. Our results indicate a low probability of real subluminal events in fluorescence detector data from TA. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 17, 2014 11:27AM - 11:39AM |
B3.00006: The Atmospheric Aerosol Density at the Telescope Array Site Davis Unruh As cosmic ray showers propagate down through the atmosphere, their interactions with atmospheric particles generate ultra-violet photons which can be detected by air-fluorescence telescopes. The Telescope Array (TA) Project utilized three such air-fluorescence telescopes to detect and visualize cosmic ray showers. However, in order to accurately model a cosmic ray shower using this technique it is important to know the Vertical Aerosol Optical Depth (VAOD), a measure of the amount of photons removed from a beam by aerosol scattering over a given distance. To measure this constant, which fluctuates daily, data was analyzed from the Telescope Array Central Laser Facility (CLF), a system which fires laser pulses vertically into the sky equidistant from TA's air-fluorescence telescopes. In particular, I have examined the dependence of the number of photons arriving at the fluorescence telescopes on the energy of the fired laser and the altitude at which they were scattered from the vertical beam. The presence of nights in which the VAOD is approximately zero allow for measurement of the constant effect of Rayleigh scattering, in turn enabling measurement of the VAOD for any given night. Utilizing this technique, plots of VAOD for three years of data were generated. [Preview Abstract] |
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