THE NIKHEF COLLOQUIA ARCHIVE 2010-2011

25-11-2011: Landelijk Seminarium @ Z011 met colloquium Guido Altarelli (CERN/Roma Tre) - "Neutrino mass and mixing: lessons and challenges"

Friday 25 November 2011
from 11.15-12.15 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: CWI/Nikhef (Z011)

Description:
In the last years we have learnt a lot about neutrino masses and mixings. Neutrinos are not all massless but their masses are very small. Probably masses are small because neutrinos are Majorana particles with masses inversely proportional to the large scale M of lepton number (L) violation, which turns out to be compatible with the GUT scale. We have understood there there is no contradiction between large neutrino mixings and small quark mixings, even in the context of GUTs and that neutrino masses fit well in the SUSY GUT picture. Out of equilibrium decays with CP and L violation of heavy RH neutrinos can produce a B-L asymmetry, then converted near the weak scale by instantons into an amount of B asymmetry compatible with observations (baryogenesis via leptogenesis). It has been established that active neutrinos are not a significant component of Dark Matter in the Universe. A long list of models have been formulated over the years to understand neutrino masses and mixings. With the continuous improvement of the data most of the models have been discarded by experiment. Still the surviving models span a wide range going from a maximum of symmetry, with discrete non abelian flavour groups, to the opposite extreme of anarchy.

18-11-2011: Colloquium Patrick Decowski (Nikhef/UvA) - "Recent Results from KamLAND on Neutrino Properties and Geoneutrinos"

Friday 18 October 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef ( H331 )

Description:
As has recently become well-known from news media, Japan uses nuclear power stations to generate much of its electrical power. Apart from generating electricity, these nuclear reactors also produce electron anti-neutrinos in the decay of radioactive products. KamLAND is a large underground neutrino detector located in Japan that measures these electron anti-neutrinos to study neutrino properties. KamLAND has provided strong evidence for neutrino oscillation by seeing the tell-tale distortion in the neutrino spectrum and measuring key neutrino mixing parameters. A secondary goal of KamLAND is to study geologically produced neutrinos, which could provide valuable information about radiogenically produced heat in the Earth's mantle, a yet unknown quantity. I will describe the physics behind these two goals, the KamLAND experiment and show our recent results, with a special emphasis on our effort to measure the heat emitted by the Earth due to radioactive decays.

28-10-2011: Colloquium Erik van der Kraaij (CERN) - "Physics and detectors at CLIC"

Friday 28 October 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef ( H331 )

Description:
The seminar reports on ongoing studies of the physics and detectors at a future TeV-scale Compact LInear Collider (CLIC). The results shown are an extraction of the Conceptual Design Report, which is to be presented by the end of this year.
The novel accelerating technology creates a train of bunches: 50 times per second, 312 bunches will cross with no more than 0.5 ns between bunch crossings. As a consequence of the intense beamstrahlung and hadronic background creation, the detectors have to cope with high occupancies. Reading out the 312 crossings in one go inbetween bunch trains, the interesting physics has to be disentangled from the overlapping background. To this end, the detectors are designed for high granularity particle flow, where reduction of the background relies on the ability to temporally and spatially separate energy depositions of the background from those from the physics interaction of interest.
Full simulation and reconstruction analyses have been performed of so-called benchmark channels, to assess the performance of the detectors. The conclusion is that the ability to perform precision physics at the 3 TeV e+e- collider is established.

21-10-2011: Colloquium Jurgen Schukraft (CERN/ALICE) - 'Little Bang at Big Collider': First results with heavy ions from the LHC

Friday 21 October 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef ( H331 )

Description:
Late November last year, the Large Hadron Collider LHC at CERN had its first run with heavy ions, Pb-Pb at 2.75 TeV/nucleon; an energy more than an order of magnitude above the one available previously. The talk will summarize first results with heavy ion beams from the Alice, Atlas and CMS experiments, comparing them where appropriate with data from lower energies (RHIC and SPS), and focusing on areas where significant progress has been made or is expected with the upcoming high luminosity run in 2011.

07-10-2011: Colloquium Thilo Michel (Erlangen) - "Searching neutrinoless double beta decay with hybrid pixel detectors"

Friday 7 October 2011
from 11:00 to 12.00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef (H331)

Speaker: Colloquium Thilo Michel (Erlangen)

Description:
The question whether neutrinos are their own antiparticles or not is still not answered with certainty. A definite observation of neutrinoless double beta decay would answer this question with "Yes, neutrinos are their own antiparticles". Provided that neutrinos and antineutrinos are the same particles, neutrinoless double beta decay - where two neutrons convert at the same time only to two electrons without (anti) neutrino emission - can occur with half-lifes longer than 1025 years only in certain nuclides. Nuclides like 75Ge, 116Cd or 136Xe for example can be used to search for occurrence of the neutrinoless double beta decay in semiconductor, liquid or noble gas detectors.

In this talk the relationship between neutrino mass and neutrinoless double beta decay half-life, experimental requirements and some experiments are described. The main part of this talk will focus on the performance and the use of fine pitch pixel detectors with CdTe sensors like the Timepix detector, developed by the Medipix collaboration. The COBRA collaboration, searching for neutrinoless double beta decay in 116Cd, is currently investigating the possibilities for background rejection and the general feasibility of an experiment using CdTe pixel detectors with high granularity. Background measurements in an underground laboratory with the Timepix detector have been performed and motivate that background rejection could be improved with an analysis of the topological information of events given by the pixel detector. Preliminary results of simulation studies concerning detector optimization with a special focus on energy resolution are presented. Experimental results for the identification of events with a signature similar to double beta decay in a measurement with background of single electron tracks will be shown.

30-09-2011: Colloquium Scott Pratt (Michigan State University) - "Charge Balance Functions, Insight into the chemical evolution of the Quark-Gluon Plasma"

Friday 30 September 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef ( H331 )

Description:
The canonical understanding of a high-energy heavy ion collision is centered around the picture that quarks are produced in two waves. The first is during the first fm/c of the collision, when gluons thermalize into the QGP. After a roughly isentropic expansion that roughly conserves the number of quarks, a second wave ensues at hadronization, 5-10 fm/c into the collision. Since entropy conservation leads to approximately roughly the same number of quanta before and after hadronization, and since each hadron contains at least two quarks, the majority of quarks appear at this later time. Charge balance functions identify, on a statistical basis, the location of balancing charges for a given hadron, and given the picture above one expects the distribution in relative rapidity to be characterized by two scales. I will show how to observe these scales with a using charge balance functions built from a variety of hadronic species. These measurements hold the prospect of providing the field's most stringent insight into the chemical evolution of the QGP.

23-09-2011: Colloquium Niels Tuning (LHCb) - "Precision Measurements at LHCb"

Friday 23 September 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef ( H331 )

Description:
The data collected in the first half of 2011 allowed LHCb to perform a large number of measurements in the flavour sector. I will focus on the analysis of three B-decays that showed hints of deviations from the Standard Model before the Summer conferences: CP violation in Bs->J/psiPhi, forward-backward asymmetry in B0->K*mumu and the branching ratio of Bs->mumu.

16-09-2011: Colloquium Chris Quigg (Fermilab) -"Particle Physics in a Season of Change"

Friday 16 September 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef/CWI ( Z011 )

Description:
I will consider some important themes in particle physics in light of new experimental information from the Large Hadron Collider and elsewhere, and will aim to deconstruct some of the central questions we will face in 2012.

02-09-2011: Colloquium Chung-Lin Shan (Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica) - "Determining Properties of WIMP Dark Matter with Direct Detection Experiments as Model Independently as Possible"

Friday 2 September 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef ( H331 )

Description:
In this talk I will briefly review the direct Dark Matter detection from the theoretical point of view. Then I will present our model-independent data analysis methods for extracting WIMP properties by using experimental data directly. E ffects of unrejected background events in analyzed data sets on the application of these methods as well as a possible check of the purity/availability of these data sets will also be discussed. I will also demonstrate the use of the AMIDAS website for detector ability/efficience simulations and (real) data analyses.

01-07-2011 Colloquium Tom Banks (UC Berkeley) - "The CUORE neutrinoless double beta decay experiment"

Friday 1 Juli 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef ( H331 )

Description: CUORE is an upcoming cryogenic bolometer experiment designed to search for neutrinoless double beta decay in Te-130. The detector will be located underground at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS), Italy, in order to achieve the extremely low backgrounds necessary for high-sensitivity searches of its kind. A predecessor experiment, Cuoricino, ran from 2003-2008 at LNGS and served as a prototype for the CUORE detector, which will be 20 times larger. I will discuss the motivation behind searches for neutrinoless double beta decay, the final results from Cuoricino, and the physics goals and status of CUORE, which is currently in the construction phase.

10-06-2011 Harald Fritzsch (LMU Munich) - "The Fundamental Constants and their Time Variation"

Friday 10 June 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef ( H331 )

Description: In the Standard Model of Particle Physics there  are 28 fundamental constants, which can be measured, but theoretically they are not understood. I will discuss these constants, which are mostly mass parameters. Astrophysical measurements indicate that the finestructure constant depends on time. In this case grand unification implies a time variation of the QCD scale. Thus the masses of the atomic nuclei and the magnetic moments of the nuclei will depend on time. In this case presumably all fundamental constants are functions of time and space. I proposed an experiment, which is currently carried out by Prof. Haensch in Munich and his group. The first results indicate a time dependence of the QCD  scale.
 

27-05-2011: Marco Pallavicini (University of Genoa): Results from Borexino

Friday 27 May 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef (H331)

Description: The Borexino experiment has just finished its first phase of data taking. The seminar will summarize very recent results on Be-7 solar neutrinos and will outline the future program for the next 4-6 years, focussed again on solar neutrino physics, geo-neutrino measurement and search the for short base line oscillations.

13-05-2011 Fred van Goor (TU Twente) - "Laser Wakefield Acceleration of ultra-short electron bunches"

Friday 13 May 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef (H331)

Description:
Acceleration of electron bunches to energies of a few GeV's is possible with compact laser driven plasma accelerators. An intense, femtosecond laser pulse propagating in a plasma pushes plasma electrons aside by the ponderomotive force and generates a plasma "wake" wave which propagates in the plasma with the speed of the laser pulse. A bunch of electrons with the correct energy and duration can be trapped and accelerated by the longitudinal electric field associated with the plasma wave to very high energies over a length of plasma of only a few cm's. The most challenging problem to be solved is how to inject a bunch with a duration of a fraction of the plasma-wavelength at the correct phase into the plasma wave with femtosecond precision to achieve well-controlled acceleration and low energy spread.

At the University of Twente the Laser Physics and Non-Linear Optics group studied external injection of a low-energy bunch of electrons into the plasma wave where bunches from a standard small linear accelerator can be used. These relatively long (ps) bunches can be compressed and trapped in the first accelerating feature of the plasma wave just behind the laser pulse. We have studied this and other external injection methods intensively. An overview of our research will be presented as well as our recent discovery of an interesting feature of the accelerated bunch. It turns out that, under certain circumstances, the bunch consists of a train of a few attosecond duration sub-pulses.

29-04-2011 Petr Vogel (Caltech) - "How difficult would it be to detect the Cosmic Neutrino Background?"

Friday 29 April 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef (H331)

Description: First I will review the derivation of the predicted number density of the cosmic neutrino background (CNB) and stress the role it plays in Hot Big-Bang Cosmology. Next I will discuss the amount of possible density enhancement in galactic clusters of massive, and by now nonrelativistic, CNB neutrinos. The application of coherent scattering to the detection of CNB will be also reviewed, and its difficulties explained. The main part of the talk will be concerned with the detection of CNB using radioactive targets. While such an approach is extremely challenging, one can envisage that it might work provided the neutrino mass is sufficiently large, perhaps at least 0.1 eV.

11-04-2011 Kees de Jager (Jefferson Lab), "Parity-violating Electron Scattering"

Monday 11 April 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef (H331) 

Description:
The ever-improving quality of the polarized electron beam at Jefferson Lab has made it possible to implement a broad research program of parity-violating electron scattering. In the first decade of JLab operations the focus was on measurements of the contributions from the strange quarks to the electric and charge form factors of the nucleon. With the contribution from the polarized beam to the systematic error on the parity-violating asymmetry now reduced to below the ppb level, the research program has been expanded to include measurements of the neutron distribution in heavy nuclei and low-energy tests of the Standard Model. Parity violation in deep-inelastic scattering can provide accurate results for the axial-vector electron-quark coupling constant C_2^{u,d}. An initial experiment has just been successfully completed, but a full study has been approved with the 12 GeV upgrade, reusing one of the large solenoids that will become available in the next few years. The broad range of kinematics that such a solenoid will allow to cover, will make it possible to extract separately possible contributions from charge-symmetry violation and higher-twist effects. Another approved experiment with the 12 GeV upgrade will study Møller scattering to yield a measurement of the weak coupling constant sin² \theta_W with an accuracy of 0.0003, comparable to that of the existing results from two collider experiments.

08-04-2011 Claus Kiefer (University of Cologne) - "DECOHERENCE - From Schrödinger's Cat to the Classical World"

Friday 08 April 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef ( H331 )

Description: How does the classical behaviour emerge in a world that is fundamentally described by quantum theory? The key to the answer is given by a process that was described for the first time forty years ago - decoherence. Decoherence is the irreversible emergence of classical properties of a quantum system through the unavoidable interaction with its environment. In my talk I shall give a general introduction into decoherence and present its most important theoretical and experimental applications. These include, in particular, the localization of objects. I shall then discuss the relevance of decoherence for the interpretation of quantum theory and end with an outlook on quantum cosmology and the origin of the direction of time.

01-04-2011 Max Klein (University of Liverpool) -"The LHeC Project at CERN"

Friday 01 April 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef (H331)

Description: An introduction is given to the physics, the accelerator and detector design concepts for the Large Hadron Electron Collider (LHeC). Colliding 60 GeV electrons with the LHC p/A beam enables high luminosity precision measurements of  deep inelastic electron-proton and electron-ion scattering at TeV energies.

25-03-2011: Raju Vanugopalan (Brookhaven National Laboratory) - "Strong color fields in the little Bang: the Glasma, the Plasma and the approach to thermalization in heavy ion collisions"

Friday 25 March 2011, Landelijk Seminarium
from: 11.15 to 12.15
location: CWI/Nikhef Z011

Description:
Heavy ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC produce QCD matter that flows like a nearly perfect fluid. How this perfect fluid is formed is an outstanding theoretical problem. We outline an ab initio treatment of early time dynamics of strong color "Glasma" fields in these collisions and describe interesting phenomena such as a "near side ridge" (seen both in A+A collisions at RHIC and in p+p collisions at the LHC) that provide insight into the Glasma. The possible key role of unstable quantum fluctuations in isotropization and hydrodynamic flow of the produced matter is discussed and open problems related to thermalization are outlined. Analogies to some aspects of inflationary dynamics in the early universe are noted.

11-03-2011 Eduardo Charbon (TU Delft) - "CMOS Single-Photon Sensors: from Quantum Detection to Biomedical Imaging"

Friday 11 March 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef (H331) 

Description:
Why do we want to detect photons and in the smallest quantities? This is not an exotic, purely academic quest. Time-resolved single-photon detection has recently given way to time-resolved imaging with the emergence of deep-submicron CMOS implementations of SPADs or single-photon avalanche diodes. SPADs enable to see inside quantum phenomena; understanding how to sense and model macroscopic phenomena using the quantum paradigm has enabled breakthroughs in a number of disciplines from computer vision to telecommunications, but it is in bio-detection and medical imaging the an even greater potential exists.

Thanks to large, massively parallel CMOS SPAD arrays, the design of scalable single-photon imagers has become a reality. SPAD pixels exhibit high sensitivity and dynamic range, low jitter and high stability. Moreover, due to the digital nature of SPADs, imaging architectures may be significantly simplified with the elimination of traditional components such as amplifiers, sample&holds, and analog-to-digital converters, as well as complex readout schemes and 1/f or FPN suppression techniques. Time-of-arrival detection can now be implemented on chip or even on-pixel while reconfigurable time-to-digital converters (TDCs) can also be used off-chip to maximize flexibility and to exploit the torrid pace of growth in FPGA technology.

In this talk I discuss SPAD based sensors and the architectural challenges posed by the quantum paradigm in CMOS integrated circuits. I introduce basic solid-state physics underlying SPADs and I discuss several modeling issues. I present recent developments and future research directions, focusing on bioimaging. I also outline ideas in emerging fields for the characterization of next generation sensors.

04-03-2011: Colloquium Wouter Verkerke (Nikhef) - "Measurement of W+jet production and of the top-pair production cross-section with ATLAS"

Friday 4 March 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef (H331) 

description:

We present first measurements of the top-quark pair-production and the inclusive W+jets cross-section in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider.

These are important Standard Model processes which have been the subject of much recent theoretical attention in preparation for LHC running.

In a data sample of 2.9 pb-1 we observe 37 top-pair candidates in the single lepton and 9 in the dilepton channel, leading to the measurement of the ttbar production cross-section sigma(ttbar) =145 +- 31^+42_-27 pb.

In a data sample of 1.3 pb-1, cross-sections, in both the electron and muon decay modes of the W boson, are presented as a function of jet multiplicity and of the transverse momentum of the leading and next-to-leading jets in the event. Measurements are also presented of the ratio of cross sections sigma(W+ >= n) / sigma(W+ >= n-1) for inclusive jet multiplicities n=1-4.

The measurements are compared to recent higher-order and high-multiplicity Standard Model calculations.

18-02-2011 Stefan Kluth (MPI fur Physik, Munchen) - "NNLO QCD analyses of e+e- annihilation to hadrons"

Friday 18th February 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef (H331) 

Description:
The talk will introduce into analysis of data from e+e- annihilation to hadrons in terms of jets and event shapes by JADE at PETRA, OPAL at LEP and other experiments. QCD predictions in NNLO, combined with resummed logarithmic terms in next-to-leading-log-approximation, are compared in several analyses to the data and the value of the strong coupling is extracted. Different approaches to modelling hadronisation effects, namely Monte Carlo event generators and analytic models, are used in the analyses and due to the improved perturbative predictions a better understanding of the hadronisation models emerges.

11-02-2011 Dorothea Samtleben (Nikhef) -"News from the oldest light"

Friday 11 February 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef (H331)

Description:
Measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) temperature fluctuations have already provided rich information about the early Universe. By now the focus of CMBR experiments lies in measuring the much smaller CMBR polarization pattern which requires unprecedented sensitivity and control of systematics. The CMBR polarization pattern is commonly divided into E-modes which derive like its temperature anisotropies from density fluctuations in the early Universe and B-modes which are due to lensing by the mass in the line of sight but are also expected as signature of primordial gravity waves and with that provide unique access to the inflationary era in the very first moments of the Universe. While E-modes have already been detected it is only now that the sensitivity of upcoming experiments approaches the level where B-modes are expected.

I will present the first results from phase I of the ground-based Q/U Imaging ExperimenT (QUIET) from data taken 2008 to 2010 with coherent radiometer arrays of 19 (90) elements at 40 (90) GHz in the Atacama desert in Chile. We provide one of the best measurements of the E-mode power spectrum at degree angular scales together with one of the best upper limits on B-modes in that angular range. The results also demonstrate the extremely low systematics of this technique and with that its potential for future measurements from the ground to complement the upcoming measurements by Planck.

28-01-2011 Mikhail Shaposhinikov (ITPP Lausanne) - "Baryon asymmetry of the Universe and neutrinos"

Friday 28 January 2011
from 11:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
location: Nikhef (H331)

Abstract: Our Universe is charge-asymmetric: it contains no antimatter in amounts comparable to matter. This fact provides cosmological evidence for the nonconservation of baryon number as well as for C and CP breaking. I will  review the problem of the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe and the ideas proposed for its solution motivated by the discoveries in neutrino physics.
 

14-01-2011 Raimond Snellings (Nikhef) - "A "Little Bang" arrives at the LHC and is seen by ALICE"

10-12-2010 Michael Green (Cambridge University) - "String Theory - a unifying principle"

No description or slides available.

07-12-2010 Bill Unruh (University of British Columbia) - "Measurement of the thermal spectrum of Hawking radiation in an analog system"

This talk discussed the problems with the derivation of Hawking radiation from black holes, the discovery that the same process predicts thermal radiation from horizons in other systems, and the measurement of the spectrum of the radiation from one such analog system (that of surface waves in water in a flume).

03-12-2010 Lina Sarro (TU Delft) - "MEMS Technology Developments for 3D integration"

MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) technology covers design, technology and fabrication efforts aimed at combining electronic functions with mechanical, optical, thermal and others and that employ miniaturization in order to achieve high complexity in a small space. Read more >>

12-11-2010 Roel van Woudenberg (Nederlandsch Octrooibureau) - "Patents and the patenting process"

Roel van Woudenberg, a patent attorney at Nederlandsch Octrooibureau (and former PhD student in the Nikhef ZEUS group), will talk about patents and the patenting process in general. He will discuss the Dutch and European patenting process and highlight differences with other patent jurisdictions (for instance in the US). Roel works in the fields of system architectures, computer implemented inventions, electronics, physics, and applied sciences.

29-10-2010 David Kosower (Saclay) - "Next-to-Leading Order QCD for the LHC"

Recent years have witnessed dramatic progress in calculations of one-loop amplitudes, which are the key ingredients in next-to-leading order calculations for collider physics. I will review the need for these calculations, as well as the developments of recent years. I will show some examples of recent applications to studies of vector boson+jet distributions at hadron colliders.

01-10-2010 Jan Uythoven (CERN) - "Present and future of the LHC"

The LHC at CERN is now routinely delivering collisions to the various experiments. The present luminosity delivered is only a fraction of its design. This presentation will give an overview of the operational experience so far and will try to explain the parameters, considerations and processes which determine the rate by which the beam intensity and luminosity can be increased.

17-09-2010 Zelimir Djurcic (Argonne National Laboratory) - "New Observations in the MiniBooNE Experiment"

The MiniBooNE neutrino oscillation search experiment at Fermilab has recently reported results from a search for numubar -> nuebar oscillations, using a data sample corresponding to 5.66x10^20  protons on target in anti-neutrino mode. The experiment is now sensitive to the excess of numubar -> nuebar  events observed by the Los Alamos Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND). The data are consistent with numubar -> nuebar in the dm^2 range of 0.1 to 1.0eV^2 and with the evidence for antineutrino oscillations from LSND. I will discuss the MiniBooNE data in this presentation, as well as its interpretation and implications.

10-09-2010 Stefano Forte (Milan University) - "The NNPDF approach to parton determination: ideas and results"

I discuss the importance of parton distributions (PDFs) for physics at the LHC. After reviewing the current state of the art of PDF knowledge, I present the novel approach to PDF determination which has been pursued by the NNPDF collaboration. I show how the NNPDF methodology, based on a monte carlo approach combined with the use of neural network, addresses the delicate issue of accurate determination of PDF uncertainties. I present recent NNPDF PDF sets, compare them with other available sets, and argue that they are most suited for discovery physics.
 

27-08-2010 Bolek Wyslouch (MIT) - "The heavy ions programme of the CMS experiment"

Wyslouch presents the capabilities of the CMS experiment to explore the heavy-ion physics programme offered by the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more >> 

09-07-2010 Patrick Koppenburg (LHCb) -"Status and first results of the LHCb experiment"

Koppenburg presented the status of the LHCb experiment and the very first results. He then focussed on the D and B physics potential with the 2010-11 data.

02-07-2010 G. Borissov (D0) -"Evidence for an anomalous like-sign dimuon charge asymmetry"

We measure the charge asymmetry (A) of like-sign dimuon events in 6.1 inverse fb of p-pbar collisions recorded with the D0 detector at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV at the Fermilab Tevatron collider.  From A, we extract the like-sign dimuon charge asymmetry in semileptonic b-hadron decays: Asupb_(sl)  = −0.00957 pm 0.00251 (stat) pm 0.00146 (syst). This result differs by 3.2 standard deviations from the standard model prediction Asupb_(sl) (SM) =  −2.3 (+0.5) (-0.6) times 10sup(-4) and provides the first evidence of anomalous CP-violation in the mixing of neutral B mesons.
Slides of the presentation

18-06-2010 Paul Kuijer (Alice) -"Status and first results of the ALICE experiment"

The ALICE experiment has been taking data since the start-up of the LHC. This presentation discussed the current status of the detector, its performance, the first publications and the ongoing analysis.

28-05-2010 Auke-Pieter Colijn (Nikhef) - "Discovery of well-known particles with the ATLAS detector at the LHC"

No description available.

07-05-2010 Thomas Schacker (Marseille, CPT & Universite de Provence) - "Noncommutative geometry and the standard model"

Connes' noncommutative geometry offers a beautiful way of unifying Einstein's gravity with a tiny class of Yang-Mills-Higgs models. The standard model of electro-weak and strong forces is in this tiny class if some of its parameters meet certain constraints. The pre- and post-dictions resulting from these constraints will be reviewed. Among these, the most striking prediction is certainly the mass of the Higgs boson at 170 ± 10 GeV. A compilation of all theoretical predictions of the Higgs mass in the literature is also attempted.

09-04-2010 David San Segundo Bello (IMEC, Leuven) - "Research on Heterogeneous Integrated Microsystems at IMEC"

The Heterogeneous Integrated Microsystems group at IMEC is an interdisciplinary research group which combines expertise in circuit design, semiconductor technology and packaging to create advanced sensor systems.
This talk will present an overview of the different achievements and running projects in the fields of photo-detection, advanced packaging technologies, low power CMOS electronics for bio-medical and sensor interfaces, low power high resolution A-to-D Converters, CMOS designs for cryogenic applications and CMOS design for advanced imaging applications.
Slides of the presentation

26-03-2010 Graham Ross (Oxford University) - @z011 11.15 - Testing SUSY

If SUSY provides a solution to the hierarchy problem then supersymmetric states should not be too heavy. This requirement is quantified by a fine tuning measure, useful in correlating the impact of the various experimental measurements relevant to the search for supersymmetry and also in identifying the most sensitive measurements for testing SUSY. Read more >>

18-03-2010 Panos Christakoglou (Nikhef) - "The ALICE experiment: From commissioning to first physics measurements"

No description available.

18-03-2010 Jorn Putschke (Yale University) - "Towards quantitative jet quenching measurements in heavy-ion collisions; Applying lessons learned at RHIC to LHC"

No description available.

16-03-2010 Matthew Lamont (Brookhaven National Laboratory) - "Understanding the glue which binds us all: Getting to the heart of Quark-Gluon matter"

No description available.

16-03-2010 Marco van Leeuwen (Utrecht University) - "Examining the Quark Gluon Plasma with parton energy loss"

No description available.

15-03-2010 Ilya Selyuzhenkov (Indiana University Cyclotron Facility) - "STAR probes of fundamental QCD symmetries and novel collective phenomena in relativistic heavy ion collisions"

No description available.

09-03-2010 Pamela Ferrari -"Searches and SM physics at LEP and LHC"

No description available.

26-02-2010 Gabor Veres (CERN) - "First CMS results: Charged hadron pseudorapidity and transverse momentum distributions in proton-proton collisions in CMS at the LHC"

Measurements of transverse momentum and pseudorapidity distributions of charged hadrons produced in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 0.9 and 2.36 TeV will be presented. Read more >>

19-02-2010 Zoltan Kunszt (ETH Zurich) - "Towards automated precision calculations for the LHC"

Automated theoretical calculations in leading order of perturbation theory are very important and widely used for the description of  complex scattering processes at high energy colliders. In many cases, however, the accuracy of the measurements can only be matched if  the next-to-leading order QCD corrections are also calculated. Recent theoretical results are providing  us with new efficient algorithms. They offer us the possibility to automate also the  evaluation of the  next-to-leading order corrections. I shall describe the main theoretical ideas behind of this development and briefly review their recent phenomenological applications.

12-02-2010 Harmen Warringa (Goethe-Universitat, Frankfurt) - "P- and CP-odd effects in heavy ion collisions"

In quantum chromodynamics (QCD) an imbalance in the number of right- and left-handed quarks will be induced by fluctuations of topological charge. This is a P- and CP-odd effect, and can potentially be relevant during heavy ion collisions. The question then is how one could investigate this imbalance in experiment. In this talk I will show that enormous magnetic fields are created in heavy ion collisions in the direction of angular momentum of the collision. I will explain that such imbalance naturally leads to generation of an electric current in the direction of the magnetic field. The magnitude of this current can be computed quantitatively. In heavy ion collisions, this current leads to separation of charge which in principle can be addressed experimentally by measuring specific charge correlations. As such these correlations could be a probe for P- and CP-odd effects in QCD. I will discuss recent results from the STAR collaboration on such charge correlations.
Slides of the presentation

05-02-2010 Erik Verlinde (UvA) - "On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton"

Starting from first principles and general assumptions Newton's law of gravitation is shown to arise naturally and unavoidably in a theory in which space is emergent through a holographic scenario. Gravity is explained as an entropic force caused by changes in the information associated with the positions of material bodies. A relativistic generalization of the presented arguments directly leads to the Einstein equations. When space is emergent even Newton's law of inertia needs to be explained. The equivalence principle leads us to conclude that it is actually this law of inertia whose origin is entropic.

05-02-2010 Marek Kowalski (Bonn university) - "Dark Energy with Supernovae"

The use of Type Ia Supernovae as cosmic standard candles pose still perhaps the most direct way to probe the Cosmic acceleration history. I will review the present status of Supernova cosmology as well as other cosmological probes. Then I will focus on what current observations can tell us about the properties of Dark Energy, i.e. our (in-)ability to distinguish dark energy models from cosmological constant. In the last part I will give an outlook at what to expect from future surveys.
Slides of the presentation

15-01-2010 Martijn Mulders (CERN) - "First Data in CMS"

In November 2009 the Large Hadron Collider at CERN produced proton-proton collisions for the first time, after many years of preparation. This talk will discuss the readiness of the CMS experiment for data taking during the start-up phase. To commission the detector and the software for data taking and analysis, the CMS collaboration has performed detailed studies of the detector performance using beam-induced and cosmic-ray muons recorded in 2008. These studies have led to an excellent understanding of the magnetic field, alignment of the silicon tracker and muon chambers, and the response and operation of the calorimeters. The talk will start with an overview of recent commissioning results followed by a preliminary look at the first data from collisions.