Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Joint Fall 2012 Meeting of the Texas Sections of the APS, AAPT, and Zone 13 of the SPS
Volume 57, Number 10
Thursday–Saturday, October 25–27, 2012; Lubbock, Texas
Session B4: Particle, Nuclear, and Accelerator Physics: 2012 Undergraduate Robert S. Hyer Award Recipient & Contributed Papers |
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Chair: Richard Wigmans, Texas Tech University Room: Holiday Inn Towers Tumbleweed |
Friday, October 26, 2012 10:30AM - 11:00AM |
B4.00001: Searching For Dark Matter Portals Using B Meson Decays to Four Leptons Invited Speaker: Landon Banister Dark matter appears to make up most of the matter in the universe, but its composition is still not understood. However, ``portals'' between normal matter and dark matter have been proposed and they can be searched for using existing experiments. The purpose of my research is to use data collected by the BaBar Experiment using electron-positron collisions from the PEP-II Collider to search for a rare connection between the standard model of particle physics and one of the many predicted dark matter models. This connection involves the decay from ``normal'' matter particles (B-mesons) into two intermediate ``dark'' particles, that then subsequent decay to lepton pairs, leading to the unique signature of a four-lepton final state. My research focused on selecting such decays and on understanding how well these decays can be understood using Monte Carlo simulation. If we observe these decays, it might help us understand the connection between normal and dark matter. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 26, 2012 11:00AM - 11:12AM |
B4.00002: Search for Supersymmetry in the Coannihilation Region of mSUGRA at the LHC Christopher Davis, David Toback, Teruki Kamon, Will Flanagan In Experimental High Energy Physics, searches for new particles involve being able to determine how well the detector can pass events before any analysis cuts are used for optimization. We have studied the HLT\_PFMET150 trigger at the CMS detector at the LHC for use in a search for supersymmetry in the coannihilation region of mSUGRA. We are able to find the efficiency as a function of MHT and also what effect the number of vertices in an event has on the efficiency. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 26, 2012 11:12AM - 11:24AM |
B4.00003: Electric susceptibility for strongly magnetized QED at finite temperature and density Paul Springsteen, Efrain Ferrer, Vivian Incera, Angel Sanchez The electric linear-response of strongly magnetized electron-positron plasmas at finite temperature and density is investigated. Calculating the one-loop polarization operator in that strongly magnetized medium, we find the photon effective Debye mass, and from there we find how the medium electric susceptibility changes with temperature and density. We are reporting a singular behavior for the electric susceptibility for values of the chemical potential close to the electron mass. Highly magnetized systems at finite temperature and density are commonly found in astrophysics applications and in heavy-ion collision experiments. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 26, 2012 11:24AM - 11:36AM |
B4.00004: Low Mass WIMP Search Using High Pressure Xenon Gas Clement Sofka Several groups around the globe employ unique detector technologies in the direct search for dark matter weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). One of the leading technologies uses scintillation and ionization signals produced when WIMPs scatter off xenon nuclei. Recent compelling results hint at the possibility of a less massive WIMP (7 -- 10 GeV/c$^{2})$, than was previously thought. A plan will be presented for a low mass WIMP search using high pressure xenon, and possibly neon gas. The design, calibration, and expected results will be discussed. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 26, 2012 11:36AM - 11:48AM |
B4.00005: Measurement of Angular Distributions for Z/gamma* plus Jet Events in pp Collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV Kittikul Kovitanggoon, Sung-Won Lee, Nural Akchurin We present the angular distributions in events containing a Z boson and a jet. The data samples correspond to $\sim$5/fb of proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV, collected by the CMS detector in the year of 2011. The jet transverse momentum must be greater than 30 GeV/c and the absolute jet pseudorapidity must be less than 2.4. We compare our measurements with a next-to-leading-order perturbative QCD calculation and two generator programs that combine tree-level matrix element calculations with parton showers. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 26, 2012 11:48AM - 12:00PM |
B4.00006: Hierarchies of Susy Splittings Walter Tangarife Garcia, Willy Fischler We explore how to generate hierarchies in the splittings between superpartners. Some of the consequences are the existence of invisible components of dark matter, new inflaton candidates, invisible monopoles and a number of invisible particles that might dominate during various eras, in particular between BBN and recombination and decay subsequently. Finally, we generalize those hierarchies to a string theory construction. [Preview Abstract] |
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