Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Far West Section Fall 2021 Meeting
Volume 66, Number 12
Friday–Saturday, October 29–30, 2021; Virtual
Session E02: HEP and Acc -1 |
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Friday, October 29, 2021 1:00PM - 1:12PM |
E02.00001: Hidden-Sector Neutrinos and Freeze-In Leptogenesis Rafael Porto, Ina Flood, Jane Schlesinger, Brian Shuve, Maxwell Thum Sterile neutrinos at the GeV scale can resolve several outstanding problems of the Standard Model (SM), such as neutrino masses and the origin of the baryon asymmetry through freeze-in leptogenesis, but they can be challenging to detect experimentally due to their small couplings to SM particles. However, in extensions of the SM with new forces or scalars, the sterile neutrinos can be produced copiously at particle colliders. We systematically investigate the impact of such interactions on the asymmetry obtained in freeze-in leptogenesis via neutrino oscillations. We find that such interactions tend to bring the sterile neutrino states into equilibrium at early times, leading to a significant reduction in the generated asymmetry. If sterile neutrinos are discovered via hidden-sector intermediate states at current or future experiments, it is likely that the couplings are too large to accommodate the observed baryon asymmetry. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 29, 2021 1:12PM - 1:24PM |
E02.00002: Proper Calibration of ICARUS Detector Walls William Barden Neutrinos are incredibly small, lightweight subatomic particles that are produced in high-energy reactionsand are known to come in three flavors, determined by the reaction that produces the neutrino: tau, muon, and electron. Neutrinos can spontaneously transition from one flavor to another as they fly through space. The mechanism for this transformation is not yet understood, and could be facilitated by a fourth type, a so-called `sterile' neutrino. The ICARUS Detector at FermiLab is comprised of multiple detector walls lined with sensors which are in turn tied to a series of ``Front-End-Boards''. In order for this data to be usable, the detector must be calibrated properly to exclude environmental sources of electrical noise such as cosmic rays. To this end, the detector has been built with a `double wall' design, that is it has both inner and outer walls. Hits can be tagged by observing the path they take through the double walls. Using time-of-flight calculations, external sources of cosmic rays can be readily subtracted from the data. We analyzed the first output from these instruments in order to calibrate a Cosmic Ray Tagger system, and identified behavioral patterns in the equipment as well as the ideal range in which it could be operated. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 29, 2021 1:24PM - 1:36PM |
E02.00003: Designing and Testing Novel Antennas for In-Ice Neutrino Experiments Julien Alfaro, Dr. Stephanie Wissel, Bryan Hendricks Neutrinos are fundamental particles that are uncharged and only interact through the weak force. This makes them ideal messenger particles because they can propagate over cosmological distances undeflected and unimpeded. The highest energy neutrinos are produced in interactions involving high energy cosmic rays and therefore provide important information about the most energetic acceleration processes in the universe. In-ice radio arrays can detect ultra high energy (UHE) neutrinos in the PeV to \textgreater 10 EeV range by detecting radio emission produced in showers when UHE neutrinos interact with the ice. This project aims to design, build, and test horizontally polarized antennas for improved gain and angular resolution in order to reconstruct neutrino arrival direction. We compare several designs including helical, folded dipoles, halo antennas, and sinuous antennas, evaluating each antenna for its gain, efficiency, and reproducibility. Designs are simulated using the XFdtd electromagnetics software and constructed in the lab, enabling a comparison of the performance of the realized antenna with models. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 29, 2021 1:36PM - 1:48PM |
E02.00004: Calibration of ICARUS Detector Walls at Fermilab Gabriel Soto In the summer of 2021, Fermilab had the mission of calibrating their new ICARUS detector with their new liquid argon time projection chamber. The detector's purpose is to shield noise and cosmic rays from interfering with data taken from~detectors and the possible discovery of the fourth neutrino. My job was to analyze the first results recorded, when investigating the different data sets taken from the detectors, we examined a variety of variables. This includes the different plots created: gain, pedestals, spectra, and linear fits. When~improving statistics of the peak finding algorithm used, we halved the bin numbers on the histograms and ran the machine for longer periods of time, which improved the gaussian fits and further improved the pedestal fits captured. We studied the different working thresholds that the detector would operate in. It was found that threshold 280 Analog to digital conversion, was the most apt for our purpose. On top of that it discovered that the best section of the detector that we were analyzing was the center section of both the east and west. These results have aided the team at Fermilab in calibrating the ICARUS detector. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 29, 2021 1:48PM - 2:00PM |
E02.00005: Search for Higgs boson pair production in the bb tau tau final state for the ATLAS Experiment at LHC of CERN Dan Brown Results of the optimization for vector boson fusion to maximize signal efficiency and minimize background are presented. The study surrounds the production of Higgs boson pairs (HH) where one decays to a pair of b quarks and the other to a tau lepton pair in the ATLAS detector in proton proton collisions at s $=$ 13 TeV. Optimized selection cuts are needed to separate not only the background, but gluon gluon fusion as well. The mass of the 2 bjets (b quarks) and the eta separation between the bjets were a main focus, finding the optimal cuts for these variables, which was around Mjj \textgreater 900 GeV and ??jj \textgreater 4. Combining other cuts from other variables, such as the transverse momentum of the 2 bjets and 2 taus, proved to improve significance. Some cuts may have given this better significance, but ended up cutting too much of our signal. Finally a boosted decision tree (BDT) was used to optimize the separation between signal and background to achieve our optimal significance for the signal. The results of this study have been presented to the US ATLAS workshop at SLAC. [Preview Abstract] |
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