Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2007 Annual Meeting of the Division of Nuclear Physics
Volume 52, Number 10
Wednesday–Saturday, October 10–13, 2007; Newport News, Virginia
Session 1WA: Workshop on Electroweak and Precision Physics I |
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Chair: David Armstrong, College of William & Mary Room: Newport News Marriott at City Center Pearl Salon I |
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 9:00AM - 9:05AM |
1WA.00001: WELCOME/INTRO
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Wednesday, October 10, 2007 9:05AM - 9:55AM |
1WA.00002: Electroweak and Precision Physics: Overview Invited Speaker: Probing for new physics using the approach of low-energy precision measurements is a fertile ground for discovery. What is the nature and mass of the neutrino? How is it that we live in a matter dominated universe? What extensions to the standard model are required? These fundamental questions are being addressed by tools that include sensitive searches for highly suppressed processes, and by precision measurements of accurately calculated standard model quantities. I will introduce the framework for a broad program of efforts where nuclear physicists play leading roles. These include neutrinoless double beta decay, neutron decay correlations and lifetime, EDM searches in several systems, beta-decay of trapped nuclei, precision muon parameter measurements, and parity-violating electron scattering. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 9:55AM - 10:30AM |
1WA.00003: Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay: a Window on the Origin of Neutrino Mass Invited Speaker: The discovery of neutrino oscillations has had a profound effect on our understanding of fundamental physics. Oscillation data have proven the existence of finite neutrino mass, and resolved three decades of experimental anomalies in solar and atmospheric neutrino measurements. On the other hand, the scale of neutrino mass implied by the data creates a new hierarchy problem for particle physics. Why are neutrinos so light compared to the quarks and charged leptons? Our best tool for addressing this question is the neutrinoless double beta decay process, which can constrain the absolute value of the neutrino masses, and more importantly, may shed light on the origin of those masses. This talk will review the current status and future plans of double beta decay experiments in the US and abroad, with emphasis on the EXO experiment. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 10:30AM - 11:00AM |
1WA.00004: COFFEE BREAK
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Wednesday, October 10, 2007 11:00AM - 11:35AM |
1WA.00005: Latest Results on Muon Decay from the TWIST Experiment Invited Speaker: The TRIUMF Weak Interaction Symmetry Test (TWIST) collaboration is searching for deviations from predictions of the Standard Model (SM) in polarized muon decay via precision measurements of the energy and angle for decay positrons. Measurements of muon decay parameters with high statistics ensure that the space-time structure of the low-energy weak interaction can be tested to the level of systematic uncertainties. Our goal is to improve the measurements of the muon decay parameters, $\rho $, $\delta $ and $P_{\mu }\xi $ by an order of magnitude over previous measurements thereby achieving sensitivity to physics beyond the SM at a level of a few parts in 10$^{4}$. First results for the three parameters have been reported [1] which yield measurements that improve their precision by about a factor of three. Analysis is nearly complete for newer measurements of $\rho $ and $\delta $ which should result in improvement by another factor of two in their precision. The experiment will be described, results of the most recent analyses will be presented and the expectations for the final results will be discussed. \newline \newline [1] B. Jamieson et al., Phys. Reve. D \textbf{74}, 072007 (2006)~; A. Gaponenko et al., Phys. Rev. D \textbf{71}, 071101(R) (2005)~; J.R. Musser et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{94}, 101805 (2005). [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 11:35AM - 12:10PM |
1WA.00006: MuLan; a precision measurement of the muon lifetime and determination of the Fermi constant Invited Speaker: The Fermi constant $G_F$ determines the rates of weak processes that range from nuclear beta-decay to stellar nucleo-synthesis. At Paul Scherrer Institute, the MuLan experiment is seeking to determine the Fermi Constant by measuring the positive muon lifetime to an unprecedented precision of about one part-per-million - a twenty-fold improvement over earlier experimental efforts. The experiment uses an intense, pulsed, muon beam and a finely-segmented, fast-timing, scintillator array to record the decays of more than $10^{12}$ muons. In this talk we report the results for the positive muon lifetime from our 2004 production run, and describe our progress to reaching the final goal of one ppm. The implications - both as a determination of a fundamental constant of the electroweak interaction and for the precision testing of the standard model - are also discussed. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 12:10PM - 1:30PM |
1WA.00007: LUNCH
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