UCL HEP Seminars
Seminars are generally held at 4pm on Fridays in room A1 on the top floor of the physics department
A calendar of all seminars in the Physics Department
is available on the Physics Events Calendar page.
If you use Google Calendar or similar, such as Apple iCal, it is possible to subscribe to this calendar via:
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Please send suggestions for topics and/or speakers to Linda Cremonesi and Andreas Korn.
Upcoming Seminars
22-02-2019 : Fredrik Bjorkeroth (Frascati)
Flavourful axion phenomenology (and impact on Mu3e/Mu2e)
Traditional axion (or ALP) models assume the axion does not distinguish between fermion generations, i.e. it is flavour-universal. This is not the case in flavoured axion models, where the symmetry that dictates fermion mass structures is (or generates) a Peccei-Quinn symmetry. Such models predict flavour-violating axion-fermion couplings which, in highly constrained flavour models, can be fixed by mass and mixing data. I will discuss the phenomenology of flavoured axions, in particular contributions to heavy meson decays and lepton flavour violating processes.
01-03-2019 : Louie Corpe (UCL)
Hacking the ATLAS detector: looking for exotic long-lived particles using displaced jets
Long-lived particles (LLPs) are nothing new: semi-stable particles abound in the SM. There’s no reason why they wouldn’t occur in extensions to the SM too. The lifetime of exotic LLPs in BSM models is typically unconstrained, and since collider detectors are usually designed assuming that the action happens near the beam crossing, LLPs that decay far from the beamline could easily have been missed by standard searches. To look for them, we therefore need to ‘hack’ our detectors to do something they were not designed to do: search for decays deeper in the detector volume. This talk describes one such search for pairs of neutral, long-lived particles decaying in the ATLAS calorimeter, leading to the formation of narrow, trackless displaced jets.
08-03-2019 : Patrick Dunne (Imperial)
Latest neutrino oscillation results from the T2K experiment
T2K is a long baseline neutrino experiment situated in Japan. We fire beams of muon neutrinos and antineutrinos 295km across the country then observe them using the 50 kTon Super Kamiokande detector. By studying how many of these neutrinos have oscillated into different flavours and whether the oscillations occur differently for antineutrinos we have sensitivity to CP violation in the neutrino sector, the neutrino mass hierarchy and the mixing angles between the neutrino flavours. I will present the latest results from the T2K collaboration including limits on the CP violating parameter \delta_{CP}.
15-03-2019 : Sebastian Trojanowski (Sheffield)
Looking forward to new physics with FASER: ForwArd Search ExpeRiment at the LHC
One of the most rapidly developing areas of research in particle physics nowadays is to look for new, light, extremely weakly-interacting particles that could have avoided detection in previous years due to the lack of luminosity. These, so-called intensity frontier searches, have also broad cosmological connections to e.g. dark matter, as well as can help to unravel the mystery of neutrino masses. In this talk, we will summarize the current status of this field with a particular emphasis on a newly proposed experiment to search for such particles produced in the far-forward region of the LHC, namely FASER, the ForwArd Search ExpeRiment. FASER has been proposed as a relatively cheap detector to supplement traditional experimental programmes searching for heavy new physics particles in the high-pT region and, therefore, to increase the whole BSM physics potential of the LHC. On top of potentially far-reaching implications to BSM particle physics and cosmology, the newly proposed detector can also be used to measure high-energy SM neutrino cross sections.