Bulletin of the American Physical Society
85th Annual Meeting of the APS Southeastern Section
Volume 63, Number 19
Thursday–Saturday, November 8–10, 2018; Holiday Inn at World’s Fair Park, Knoxville, Tennessee
Session E02: Cosmology and Astrophysics |
Hide Abstracts |
Chair: Andrew Steiner, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Room: Holiday Inn Knoxville Downtown LeConte |
Friday, November 9, 2018 8:30AM - 9:00AM |
E02.00001: Chronicling the Previous and Next 20 Years of Exoplanet Observations Invited Speaker: Ryan Oelkers Technological advancements in the past two decades have led to a dramatic rise in the number of wide-field surveys which monitor large portions of the sky on a nightly basis. The first generation of time-series exoplanet surveys contributed to the discovery, cataloging, and study of a substantial number of unique and interesting exoplanets. The current and next generation of all-sky surveys, such as Gaia, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and the fifth Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V), will enable accurate, empirical measurements of fundamental properties of hundreds of exoplanets with ultra-precise measurements of stellar parallax, nearly continuous measurements of photometric variability, and detailed chemical abundances. These observations will provide the opportunity to develop and test theoretical models of planet formation and evolution, with a precision previously possible only for planets in our own Solar System. |
Friday, November 9, 2018 9:00AM - 9:30AM |
E02.00002: How we're searching for Dark Matter, and when are we going to finally find it! Invited Speaker: Tarek Saab The Universe is a wild and wooly place, simultaneously very cold (with a CMB temperature of 2.7 K) and exceedingly hot (full of ~106 K intergalactic x-ray emitting gas), and made up of things like the strangely named Cold Dark Matter (whose temperature in our neighborhood of the Milky Way is ~108 K). In an effort to understand the inner workings of the Universe, physicists have been coming up with new detection schemes and resurrecting old ones in order to detect an elusive particle that makes up the majority of the Universe's mass. This talk will discuss the field of dark matter direct detection: the underlying techniques that people, the current status of the searches, and the plans for the future. |
(Author Not Attending)
|
E02.00003: Astrophysical signatures of caustic ring of dark matter Sankha Subhra Chakrabarty, Pierre Sikivie The caustic ring model is a proposal for full phase space distribution of cold dark matter in the galactic halo which predicts the existence of ring caustics in the galactic plane. Under self-similarity, the radius of a caustic ring increases on cosmological time scales. We have studied the effects of a caustic ring on the stars and interstellar gas as the caustic sweeps through the stellar disk. We have found that a stellar orbit is strongly perturbed by the gravitational field of a nearby caustic. Simulating the dynamics of half a million stars under the influence of each caustic ring, we have predicted the relative over-densities of the stars to be approximately 120, 45, 30 and 15% near the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th caustic rings. We have also determined the density profile of interstellar gas near each caustic ring. |
Friday, November 9, 2018 9:42AM - 9:54AM |
E02.00004: Mysterious Dark Matter with a Rare Form of Electromagnetism Andres Florez, Alfredo Gurrola, Will Johns, Jessica Maruri, Paul Sheldon, Savanna Rae Starko While most theories and models assume dark matter (DM) interacts through exotic forces not encountered in everyday life, this research has developed a new methodology, including improved particle detectors for the LHC experiments, to discover a DM particle that makes use of the same force that makes magnets stick to your refrigerator, that is electrically neutral, has a similar mass as a proton, the same spin as an electron, and possesses a form of electromagnetism called an anapole. This research implements the anapole dark matter (ADM) model into a software package called MadGraph and includes performed simulations of ADM production via photon-photon fusion (PPF) in glancing proton-proton collisions. The evolution of the cross-section and kinematic distributions with varying ADM masses is studied, which provides insight into how often ADM particles at the LHC are expected to be produced and the corresponding discovery signature inside the CMS detector. The current proton-proton collision data at CMS provides discovery potential for ADM particles up to masses of 1000 GeV. Over the next 10 years, the LHC is expected to deliver over 10 times the amount of data currently available, expanding the discovery reach to 1400 GeV. |
Friday, November 9, 2018 9:54AM - 10:06AM |
E02.00005: Minimal Gravitational Coupling Between Dark Matter and Dark Energy Kevin Ludwick Dark energy and dark matter are two of the biggest mysteries of modern cosmology, and our understanding of their fundamental nature is incomplete. Many parameterizations of couplings between the two have been studied in the literature, and observational data from the growth of perturbations can constrain these parameterizations. Dark matter and dark energy interact gravitationally over long distances, so they should at least be coupled via the graviton. Assuming standard general relativity with no explicit coupling between dark energy and dark matter fields in the Lagrangian, we calculate the gravitational interaction cross section and examine any observational implications that may follow. |
Friday, November 9, 2018 10:06AM - 10:18AM |
E02.00006: Reconstruction of Glitch-affected Gravitational Wave data using Artificial Neural Networks Sumeet S Kulkarni, Marco Cavaglia Real-time Gravitational Wave data at LIGO encounters numerous glitches arising from known and unknown sources of noise. In cases where they occur in conjunction with an incoming Gravitational Wave (GW) signal, they can seriously hinder signal detection and its consequent analysis. Current techniques to handle such scenarios include applying a gated cut to the data segment which includes a glitch, and later carefully model the glitch to clean the data segment in question. Here, we explore the use of different machine learning regression models to reconstruct the glitch-affected regions of a data stream whenever the glitch appears over a GW signal. We compare Multi-layered Perceptron (MLP) based Neural Network towards this goal and present a proof of concept for a low-latency, glitch-independent method of cleaning and reconstructing glitch-affected data for a quick primary analysis of an incoming GW signal. |
Friday, November 9, 2018 10:18AM - 10:30AM |
E02.00007: Constraining Extinction Due to Dust in Distant Galaxies Alexander F Kirby, Varsha Kulkarni, Monique Aller Extinction due to interstellar dust is a ubiquitous phenomenon that dims and reddens the light of background objects. As such, it is essential to apply extinction corrections to observations of distant objects in order to deduce their properties. Since the discovery of interstellar extinction in 1930, astronomers have developed a fairly detailed understanding of the interstellar dust in the Milky Way and other Local Group galaxies, especially the Magellanic Clouds. However, studies of extinction by dust in galaxies beyond the Local Group have been limited. In this work, we seek to generate better constraints on dust extinction in other galaxies in order to improve corrections for observations of objects that lie beyond them. As such, we are constructing spectral energy distributions (SEDs) for quasars/active galactic nuclei whose lines of sight go through foreground galaxies at lower redshifts. We will describe our compilation of archival optical, UV, and IR spectroscopic and photometric data from various observatories. Using the SEDs compiled from these data, and fitting the underlying continuum of the background quasar/AGN, we will estimate dust extinction curves for each foreground galaxy, and compare those with known extinction curves. |
Friday, November 9, 2018 10:30AM - 10:42AM |
E02.00008: Heavy Graviton Search at the Large Hadron Collider Yuhan Guo, Alfredo Gurrola, Savanna R Starko, Paul Douglas Sheldon, Will Johns, Oishik Ray, Andres Florez The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, aimed to relate particles and forces, fails to build such relation for gravitation. Certain theories predicting “Graviton,” mediator for gravitation, to be a massive (hence potentially detectable) spin-2 particle have raised high experimental interest. Yet so far no search has discovered such particle at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This research develops a search methodology for a massive spin-2 particle using Vector Boson Fusion (VBF) processes at the LHC. We consider potential reasons the current searches, mainly relying on Drell-Yan (DY) processes, have observed no graviton, including potentially low coupling strength between the graviton, quarks, and gluons. The VBF topology, with no reliance upon the QCD coupling strength, offers an alternative and complementary search strategy. We further combine the VBF topology with the diphoton decay channel, a novel search for the LHC. We show that the requirement of a high mass diphoton pair combined with two high $p_T$ forward jets with large dijet mass and with large separation in pseudorapidity can significantly reduce the SM backgrounds. We expect discovery potential for TeV scale graviton masses. |
Follow Us |
Engage
Become an APS Member |
My APS
Renew Membership |
Information for |
About APSThe American Physical Society (APS) is a non-profit membership organization working to advance the knowledge of physics. |
© 2024 American Physical Society
| All rights reserved | Terms of Use
| Contact Us
Headquarters
1 Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-3844
(301) 209-3200
Editorial Office
100 Motor Pkwy, Suite 110, Hauppauge, NY 11788
(631) 591-4000
Office of Public Affairs
529 14th St NW, Suite 1050, Washington, D.C. 20045-2001
(202) 662-8700