PRISMA Colloquium

Current and future Gravitational Wave (GW) observatories target the nHz to kHz frequency range. However, phenomena both within and beyond the Standard Model can give rise to GW signals above kHz. We will briefly discuss what these signals could be, before focusing on promising techniques to search for high-frequency GWs using resonant electromagnetic cavities. The technologies that have been developed to search for axion dark matter are directly transferrable to a search for GWs. Concurrent GW/axion searches are an exciting possibility.
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Using the idea of a field guide as a template, the referent will briefly review the rapidly expanding catalog of known mesons, which are strongly interacting subatomic particles made from equal numbers of quarks and antiquarks. While most mesons can be successfully described as one quark bound to one antiquark, recent discoveries point towards the existence of new meson families. These discoveries, made at experiments such as the BESIII e+e- experiment in Beijing and the LHCb pp experiment at the LHC, offer new contexts in which to study the strong force of particle physics.
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A conformal field theory is a physical theory which is invariant under changes in its length or energy scale. It describes the physics of boiling of water. In this talk, the referent will present how conformal field theory is used as a powerful tool to study quantum gravity. She will discuss how conformal field theories describe quantum properties of a family of black holes, just as quantum mechanics describes the Hydrogen atom.
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SND@LHC is a compact and stand-alone experiment to perform measurements with neutrinos produced at the LHC in a hitherto unexplored pseudo-rapidity region of 7.2 < 𝜂 < 8.4, complementary to all the other experiments at the LHC. The experiment is located 480 m downstream of IP1 in the unused TI18 tunnel. The detector is composed of a hybrid system based on an 800 kg target mass of tungsten plates, interleaved with emulsion and electronic trackers, followed downstream by a calorimeter and a muon system. The configuration allows efficiently distinguishing between all three neutrino flavours, opening a unique opportunity to probe physics of heavy flavour production at the LHC in the region that is not accessible to ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. This region is of particular interest also for future circular colliders and for predictions of very high-energy atmospheric neutrinos. The detector concept is also well suited to searching for Feebly Interacting Particles via signatures of scattering in the detector target. The first phase aims at operating the detector throughout LHC Run 3 to collect a total of 250 fb−1. The experiment has been taking data successfully during the proton physics run of 2022. We show the detector concept, design and performance as well as the first physics results.
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Indirect high-precision searches for possible deviations from Standard Model predictions at low energies are an important tool for finding signatures of new physics. Ab-initio theoretical predictions involving the strong nuclear force at small energies are only possible using Monte Carlo methods in a numerical approach known as Lattice QCD. In recent years lattice calculations of several quantities, such as the pion decay constant, have reached a precision of O(1%), where electromagnetic effects can no longer be neglected. In this talk Vera Gülpers will discuss how electromagnetic effects can be included in lattice calculations and present results of our recent calculation of electromagnetic corrections to leptonic pion and kaon decays.
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The referent will overview the problem of baryon asymmetry of the Universe and the theoretical framework within which the baryogenesis, i.e. the dynamical generation of a matter–antimatter asymmetry, can occur. He will discuss different mechanisms for baryogenesis with special emphasis to those of them that can be experimentally tested.
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Forty years ago as an undergraduate contemplating graduate school in high energy physics, the referent declined a research assistantship to work on a neutrino experiment because neutrinos weren’t interesting … they were massless and weakly interacting so produced frustratingly few events to analyze even in massive detectors. How things have changed! The more we learn, the more we realize the importance of the most abundant known matter particle in the universe. In the decades since my naïve snubbing of this intriguing particle we have developed a well-established three-flavor paradigm that may help explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe. Yet beyond that, a few intriguing measurement “anomalies” hint at the existence of something stranger still, a neutrino that does not interact via any known forces except gravity, a sterile neutrino. Robert Wilson will give a brief overview of the results that motivated a definitive search for sterile neutrinos with a mass in the 1 eV/c2 range – the Short-Baseline Neutrino program at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He will describe the physics sensitivity and the detectors that will measure the appearance of electron-type neutrinos in a muon-type neutrino beam using massive liquid argon time-projection chambers with an emphasis on the 760-ton far detector developed by the ICARUS collaboration. Operating both in Italy’s Gran Sasso underground laboratory and now at Fermilab, this detector demonstrated the viability of the technology for large-scale experiments such as the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).

The presentation covers the aspects of the use the accelerators for the hadron therapy. It includes the summary of the advantages of hadron use for radiation treatment of cancer, the technological solutions used for the beam acceleration, dose delivery and application, and an overview over the types of commercially available systems. Following that, the presentation concludes by describing the newly established the PARticle Therapy REsearch Center (PARTREC) in Groningen. Using the superconducting cyclotron AGOR and being embedded within the University Medical Center Groningen, providing proton beams of up to 190 MeV and ion beams (up to Pb) with energies up to 90 MeV/nucleon for pre-clinical research in medical physics and radiobiology.
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Everything around us, cookies, rocks, stars, galaxies... is made up of “matter” and not “antimatter”. We know that if antimatter comes close to matter, they annihilate each other leaving only energy behind. That we are here means there is no antimatter to annihilate with us! But what happened to the antimatter in the Universe? Where did it go? How did it disappear? Why/how did matter stay behind? The referent will talk about this mystery and possible ways around it, which requires new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.
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Perturbation theory remains one of the main tools in physics, in particular in quantum theories. However, most perturbative series diverge factorially, and it is not obvious how to extract information from them. Their divergence also suggests that, in order to obtain accurate results, one might need additional non-perturbative information. The theory of resurgence has been proposed as a general framework to address these issues. In this talk the referent will give an introduction to this theory and will illustrate it with applications -old and new - in quantum mechanics and in quantum field theory.
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A rich number of astrophysical and cosmological observations indicate the existence of a massive, non-luminous and non-baryonic matter component which is commonly referred to as dark matter (DM). One well motivated class of DM are weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) which arise naturally from several beyond-Standard-model theories. The XENON dark matter project aims for the direct detection of WIMPs utilizing the concept of a dual-phase time projection chamber (TPC), currently operating the 4th generation of XENON experiment, XENONnT, at the INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso underground laboratory. XENONnT was designed as a fast upgrade of its predecessor XENON1T, augmented by many new subsystems -- among them the world's first water Cherenkov neutron veto. The XENONnT TPC features a sensitive liquid xenon mass of 5.9 t and an unprecedented low background of intrinsic 85Kr and 222Rn, leading to an electronic recoil background rate of (15.8 +/- 1.3) events / t year keV in the region of interest. In this seminar we will report on the first WIMP search results with the XENONnT experiment, conducted in a blind analysis in an energy range between 3.1 keV and 60.0 keV, and an exposure of approximately 1.1 tonne-year.
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In this talk the referent reviews the recent status of the hypothesis of sterile neutrinos with masses in the eV range, motivated by oscillation searches at short baselines. Indications for muon to electron neutrino transitions from the LSND and MiniBooNE experiments are in severe tension with constraints from disappearance experiments. Previous hints for electron neutrino disappearance at short-baseline reactor experiments are neither confirmed by recent data (among others from the STEREO experiment) nor supported by updated reactor flux determinations. However, previous indications from radio-active source experiments in gallium detectors have been recently confirmed by the BEST collaboration, which observes a neutrino-induced count rate about 20% lower than expected at about 5 sigma significance. However, an explanation in terms of sterile neutrinos is in strong tension with other constraints. If any of these anomalies is due to new physics, most likely more ingredients than sterile neutrino oscillations are required. The referent will comment on possible explanations of the gallium anomaly in terms of quantum decoherence.

The fine structure constant is a fundamental parameter in the Standard Model, playing a crucial role in computing a wide range of observables and consistency relations. While the current error on $\Delta\alpha(M_Z)$ is at the level of $\sim10^{-4}$, future requirements, such as those of the FCC-ee/ILC, demand a reduction. In this talk, the referent presents an updated calculation of the hadronic contribution to $\Delta\alpha(M_Z)$. He will review different computational methods, such as the explicit integration in the timelike , renormalization group equations (RGE), and the euclidean split technique. The results emphasize the importance of accurately accounting for the charm quark contributions.