PRISMA Colloquium

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.

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.

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.