Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2020 Fall Meeting of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics
Volume 65, Number 12
Thursday–Sunday, October 29–November 1 2020; Time Zone: Central Time, USA
Session KM: Mini-Symposium: Neutrinos I |
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Chair: Alejandro Sonzogni, BNL |
Saturday, October 31, 2020 8:30AM - 9:06AM |
KM.00001: Neutrinoless double beta decay and the search for neutrino mass Invited Speaker: Erin Hansen Despite years of intense focus, there is much still to learn about neutrinos. For example, the absolute neutrino mass scale and potential Majorana masses are still unknown, requiring exploration of physics beyond the Standard Model. This talk will highlight a selection of current and future efforts focused on the absolute neutrino mass through measurements of the tritium $\beta$-energy spectrum. Additionally, searches for neutrinoless double beta decay have moved to the ton-scale, spanning the isotopes available to undergo this rare process and providing information about Majorana masses of neutrinos. I will discuss advances in hardware and software techniques from several experiments including CUORE, which searches for 0$\nu\beta\beta$ in ${}^{130}$Te using a bolometric array of TeO$_2$ crystals and is currently taking data at Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS). [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, October 31, 2020 9:06AM - 9:18AM |
KM.00002: Benchmarking New Hardware For Machine Learning In Neutrino Physics Stefano Vergani Over the last ten years, the popularity of Machine Learning (ML) has grown exponentially in all scientific fields, included particle physics. The amount of data and its complexity has grown as well, and the computing power required to perform inference can nowadays hardly be managed by the existing technology. Central Processing Units (CPUs) are generally affordable and ready to use but their ability to run Artificial Intelligence (AI) is very limited. In recent years, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have started to be used with very good results but they expensive, require a lot of power, and they are difficult to program since they were not invented for this task. Recently, Google has produced a brand new Edge Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) made explicitly to perform inference. It is cheap, it consumes less power than a GPU, and it comes with the portable size of a USB-key. A generic Liquid Argon Time-Projection Chamber (LArTPC) has been simulated and images produced by fictitious neutrino interactions have been used to benchmark the Edge TPU. Several popular Deep Learning (DL) models have been trained with those images using TensorFlow software and the performance of the Edge TPU during inference has been tested and compared with CPUs and GPUs. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, October 31, 2020 9:18AM - 9:30AM |
KM.00003: Unified model of nucleon elastic form factors and implications for neutrino-oscillation experiments Xilin Zhang, T.J. Hobbs, Gerald A. Miller Precise knowledge of the nucleon's axial-current form factors is crucial for modeling GeV-scale neutrino-nucleus interactions. However, these form factors remain insufficiently constrained to meet the precision requirements of upcoming long-baseline neutrino-oscillation experiments. In this talk, I will discuss our recent study of the axial pseudo-vector elastic form factor, using the light-front approach to build a quark-diquark model of the nucleon with an explicit pion cloud. The model is first calibrated to existing experimental information on the nucleon's electromagnetic form factors, and then used to predict the axial form factor. We use our form factor results to explore the (quasi-)elastic scattering of neutrinos by (nuclei)nucleons. Based on this exploration, I will address the inadequacy of the widely-implemented dipole ansatz for modeling neutrino scattering processes: the ansatz leads to a 5-10\% over-estimation of the total cross section, depending on the (anti)neutrino energy, and over-estimations of similar size in the flux-averaged cross sections for the upcoming DUNE long-baseline neutrino-oscillation experiment. Relevant reference: arXiv:1912.07797. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, October 31, 2020 9:30AM - 9:42AM |
KM.00004: Electrons for Neutrinos: Lepton Energy Reconstruction in the Resonance Excitation Region Lucas Tracy Extracting neutrino oscillation parameters from experiments such as DUNE relies on determining the incident neutrino energy for each event individually. We exploited the similarities between electron- and neutrino-nucleus scattering to test energy reconstruction techniques using electron data with a known beam energy from the CLAS detector at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Previous work done for the CLAS Collaboration by the Electrons for Neutrinos ($e4\nu$) Collaboration focused on the more easily understood quasielastic events with one proton and zero pions. We extended this analysis to $1p1\pi$ events, which are dominated by resonance production. Only a fraction of the $p\pi^-$ events reconstructed to the correct beam energy and none of the $p\pi^+$ events did. We will present data on the incident energy and target mass dependence of the energy reconstruction, as well as comparisons to simulations using the GENIE neutrino event generator. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, October 31, 2020 9:42AM - 9:54AM |
KM.00005: Status of the MARLEY event generator for low-energy neutrinos Steven Gardiner Monte Carlo event generators are a key tool in the interpretation of data collected by high-energy and nuclear physics experiments. To date, the development of event generators for the neutrino physics community has primarily focused on the high energy regime (several hundreds of MeV and above) of interest for accelerator experiments. Despite their successes in modeling neutrino-nucleus interactions at high energies, the standard generators used by accelerator neutrino experiments typically rely on model approximations that become inappropriate for low energy neutrinos produced by the Sun, by supernovae, and by terrestrial sources. Examples of such approximations include the use of a relativistic Fermi gas (RFG) model of the nucleus (which neglects discrete level structure and giant resonance excitations) and the simulation of hadronic final-state interactions via a semi-classical cascade (which may neglect low-energy de-excitation processes like $\gamma$-ray emission). To overcome these limitations, the MARLEY event generator seeks to provide a more realistic physics treatment in simulations of low-energy neutrino scattering on complex nuclei. This talk presents recent improvements to the physics modeling and simulation capabilities of MARLEY. [Preview Abstract] |
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