Revealing the Unique Nature of Neutrino Using Fast Timing
| Date/Time: | Monday, 19 Mar 2018 from 4:10 pm to 5:00 pm |
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| Location: | Phys 0003 |
| Phone: | 515-294-5441 |
| Channel: | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences |
| Actions: | Download iCal/vCal | Email Reminder |
Abstract: An intriguing fundamental question about the neutrino is whether it is its own antiparticle, a possibility proposed by Ettore Majorana more than 80 years ago. Observation of the neutrinoless double-beta decay (0 upsilon beta beta-decay) would establish that the neutrino is a Majorana particle and would prove that total lepton number is not conserved. Since the lower limit on the life-time of 0 upsilon beta beta now exceeds the age of the universe by many orders of magnitude, experiments searching for this rare process are required to have an increasingly large active detector mass. A kiloton-scale liquid-scintillator detector deep underground is an attractive option due to size and good energy resolution. In such a detector, neutrino interactions due to 8B decays in the sun can become the dominant background. These events are usually considered as irreducible background because of an overlap in deposited energy with the 0 upsilon beta beta-decay signal. I will show that in a large liquid scintillator detector surrounded by fast photo-detectors, such as the Large-Area Picosecond Photo-Detectors (LAPPDTM), it is possible to reconstruct the event topology and separate the two-tracks 0 upsilon beta beta-decay signal from the one-track solar 8 sup beta solar background events. I will also discuss recent advances in the development of the LAPPDTM.
Bio: Andrey Elagin is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. He received his BS in Physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 2003, continued on in the graduate program receiving an MS in Physics in 2005.
In 2002-2006, he worked at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna where he was involved in a number of projects including measuring hadron production cross-sections at the HARP experiment at CERN and developing computer simulation of the forward detector for the International Linear Collider.
In 2006, he joined Texas A&M University as a graduate student searching for the Higgs boson at the CDF experiment at Fermilab. He got his PhD from Texas A&M in 2011 and moved on to a Postdoctoral Scholar position at the University of Chicago developing new instrumentation and experimental techniques for particle physics experiments. He has been a research faculty at the University of Chicago since 2017.