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Pushing physics boundaries with precise timing

Simone Mazza, UC Santa Cruz
Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 4:00pm
CENPA Conference Room NPL-178

We are currently in a period in time where there's no clear path forward in the field of particle physics. After the discovery of the Higgs boson the Standard Model is apparently complete. However, many cracks are starting to appear in the Standard Model (e.g. the recent g-2 result). Therefore, it is imperative for the physics community to push even more for new horizons. This effort must include both large-scale experiments (like Higgs factories or the FCC-hh) and small-scale experiments (like PIONEER). The development of crucial technology is imperative in both categories of experiment. My research is focused on discovering what’s beyond the Standard Model; to enable this effort I’m developing timing sensors to achieve full 4D (x,y,z,t) tracking. I’m mostly an expert in Low Gain Avalanche Detectors (LGADs), which are thin silicon detectors with modest internal gain with extremely good time resolution (down to <20ps). PIONEER, in which I’m heavily involved, is a next-generation experiment to measure the charged-pion branching ratio to electrons vs. muons and the pion beta decay with an order of magnitude improvement in precision. I’m positive that PIONEER will be a small experiment with a big impact. In this seminar, I’ll also introduce the ePIC detector at the electron-ion collider, its physics program and how fast timing is crucial to achieve its baseline performance. There will also be a brief overview of future colliders.

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