Panel with Dr. Ania Harlick, Dr. Henry Shum, Dr. Nomaan X, Dr. Sabrina Leslie, and Dr. Sanjeev Seahra
Life as a physicist can take you many directions; just in academia, there are many different fields and positions one might end up in. On this panel, we hear about physicists of many walks of life and different stages of their careers for some insight of what the future might hold for you...
A presentation/workshop by Dr. Stephen Heard
As an author of a scientific paper, you face a bewildering array of options for publication. There are thousands of journals: some very general, and some narrow in scope; some well-known, and some obscure. The situation is complicated even further by the recent proliferation of “predatory” journals and by an escalation in publishing costs. Dr....
While it is considered to be one of the most promising hints of new physics beyond the Standard Model, dark matter is as yet known only through its gravitational influence on astronomical and cosmological observables. I will discuss our current best evidence for dark matter’s existence as well as the constraints that astrophysical probes can place on its properties while highlighting some...
Hyperbolic lattices are a new form of synthetic quantum matter in which particles effectively hop on a discrete tiling of two-dimensional hyperbolic space, a non-Euclidean space of negative curvature. Hyperbolic tilings were studied by the British-Canadian geometer H.S.M. Coxeter and popularized through art by M.C. Escher. Recent experiments in circuit quantum electrodynamics and electric...
The interpretation of experimental results in particle physics is complicated by the fact that essentially all experimental probes of short distance physics are complex multi-scale processes, and so our ability to interpret experiments depends on our ability to factorize the physics at different distance scales. A simple example is the factorization of hadronic cross sections into...
Aside from the lightest elements, hydrogen, helium and some lithium, which were formed in the big bang, the vast majority of the elements around us were (and are) formed in stars, through chains of nuclear reactions and decays. While the general picture of how the various elements are formed is mostly complete, constructing a detailed understanding of element formation remains an active area...
The Bomem DA3 series of Fourier transform (FT) spectrometers were the first commercially available research-grade instruments of their type. They were available for purchase from 1980-2000. This FT could achieve an ultimate resolution of 0.0025 cm-1, with a resolvance of 106 at any wavelength, impressive specifications even for a similar modern instrument. The scanning Michelson interferometer...
We really understand a phenomenon in science when we can use it to make something new. This interplay between fundamental science and new materials is particularly vibrant in the highly interrelated fields of biological physics and soft materials, where a confluence of experimental techniques and theoretical approaches meet to address fundamental questions. What is a gel? How do...
Skyrmions are a topologically non-trivial magnetic state that has been observed in several different magnetic materials, such as the chiral cubic magnets Cu2OSeO3, FeGe, and MnSi. In these non-centrosymmetric systems, competition between the symmetric exchange interaction and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction results in the formation of incommensurate spin textures, such as the vortex-like...
The impact of the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) on secondary education continues to disrupt and profoundly affect student learning and success at post-secondary institutions. Many university instructors have noted and reported that there has emerged a significant gap between course instructor expectations and students’ abilities for pandemic cohorts of students. Urgent consideration...
The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics has been very successful in describing the elementary particles and their interactions. The search for neutrinoless double-beta decay ($0\nu\beta\beta$) offers a way to probe for physics beyond the SM. Observation of $0\nu\beta\beta$ would unambiguously demonstrate violation of lepton number. Additionally, it could also help explain the observed...
Radioactivity in particulates contributes significantly to the background in ultra-low background experiments. The alpha generated from dust provides a degraded energy signal on the detector that mimics low-energy nuclear recoil events, which is background to rare event particle detectors, especially dark matter search experiments. A particulate cleaning station, which includes controlled gas...
Bound-state $\beta$-decay ($\beta_b^-$-decay) is a radically transformative decay mode that can change the stability of a nucleus and generate temperature- and density-dependent decay rates. In this decay mode the $\beta$-electron is created directly in a bound atomic orbital of the daughter nucleus instead of being emitted into the continuum, so the decay channel is only significant in almost...
The properties of heavy 5d transition metal oxides, such as iridates and osmates, are often remarkably different from those of their lighter 3d counterparts. In particular, the presence of strong spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in these compounds can give rise to a variety of exotic quantum states, including spin-orbital Mott insulators, topological insulators, Weyl semimetals, and quantum spin...
A kW laser beam focused on metal creates a highly dynamic environment of considerable importance to automotive production and 3D additive manufacturing. For example, laser welding allows the use of non-traditional materials to reduce vehicle weight (for improved fuel efficiency) but provides no direct on-the-fly quality indicator. The dramatic increase in demand for electric vehicles has...
The instability of the vacuum in the presence of a strong static electric field that creates charged pairs is Schwinger pair production. In this talk we describe the classical field theory of pair creation using non-hermitian quantum mechanics. The Klein-Gordon equation in 1+1 dimensions in the presence of a constant electric field with an ansatz $\phi(x,t) = e^{-\mathrm{i}\omega...
Review sessions, designed to provide students additional practice and support for summative assessments, help with prioritizing course material. With multitude of resources available online, the importance shifts to ensuring that students are engaged, inspired, aware of the level at which they will be tested, and able to assess their own knowledge. In courses that have problem solving skills...
The Eguchi-Hanson-AdS_5 family of spacetimes are a class of static, geodesically complete, asymptotically locally AdS_5 soliton solutions of the vacuum Einstein equations with a negative cosmological constant. They have negative mass and are parameterized by an integer p ≥ 3 with a conformal boundary with spatial topology L(p, 1). In this talk, I will introduce mode solutions of the scalar...
Over the past decade, there has been a growing recognition in the physics community of the need for students in undergraduate physics programs to develop computational skills. Not only are computational skills utilized in a wide variety of careers, but they also teach students transferrable skills such as problem solving, analysis and critical thinking. While the value of these skills is...
Performing in-situ ion beam analysis to determine metal oxide growth mechanisms poses challenges due to the incompatibility of a electrolyte solution with ultra-high vacuum (UHV). To circumvent this problem, a specialized in-situ cell was developed which isolates the liquid electrolyte from the UHV using a silicon wafer, preventing any contact between vacuum and liquid. This wafer is equipped...
Nuclear pairing, i.e., the tendency of nucleons to form pairs, has important consequences to the physics of neutron star crusts and heavy nuclei. While the pairing found in nuclei typically happens between identical nucleons and in singlet states, recent investigations have shown that certain heavy nuclei can exhibit triplet and mixed-spin pairing correlations in their ground states. In this...
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a non-invasive diagnostic tool that uses magnetic fields and radio waves to create detailed images of the body's internal structures. This lecture introduces MRI and explains the physical principles behind the formation of images from signals derived from the magnetic moments of 1H nuclei.
The lecture will discuss the fundamental concepts of MRI,...
LoLX is a small scale R&D experiment, hosted at McGill University, which aims to study the properties of liquid xenon (LXe) scintillation light and characterize Cherenkov light emission in LXe with cutting-edge photo-detection technology. It supports next-generation rare-decay experiments, such as nEXO, which will search for neutrinoless double-beta decay in LXe. Interactions in nEXO produce...
I present studies on a deep convolutional autoencoder originally designed to remove electronic noise from a p-type point contact high-purity germanium (HPGe) detector. With their intrinsic purity and excellent energy resolutions, HPGe detectors are suitable for a variety of rare event searches such as neutrinoless double-beta decay, dark matter candidates, and other exotic physics. However,...
The slow (s) and rapid (r) neutron capture processes have long been considered to produce nearly the entirety of elements above Fe. Under further scrutiny, when comparing expected s-process and r-process yields with spectroscopic data, inconsistencies in abundance arise in the Z=40 region. These differences are expected to be attributable to the intermediate (i) neutron capture process....
We study the quantum-classical Einstein equation from a Hamiltonian perspective where the classical gravitational phase space variables and matter state evolve self-consistently. Applied to cosmology, we show that the resulting equations with a quantized massive scalar field permit exact semiclassical static universes, where the curvature and cosmological constant $\Lambda$ arise as discrete...
We present the results of a finite-temperature study of a Heisenberg-Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Hamiltonian on AB-stacked kagome bilayers. We develop an exact analytical coarse-graining procedure to map the microscopic Hamiltonian onto a generalized XY model on a triangular lattice. To leading order, the effective XY model includes both bilinear and biquadratic interactions. In a large portion of...
Appropriate characterization is vital for improvement of the electronic properties of semiconductors in photovoltaic devices, which will enable solar energy to compete with non-renewable energy sources. A critical electro-optical characterization tool for determining the carrier mobility in thin-film solar cells is offered by photo-carrier extraction by linearly increasing voltage...
Multiple choice questions are a common teaching and evaluation tool supporting Peer Instruction (PI) pedagogy in large-enrolment introductory physics classes across Canadian universities. Unfortunately, the multiple-choice format limits the opportunities for the students to formulate their own ideas. In addition, such questions often over-simplify the phenomena presented. Case studies based on...
nEXO is a proposed tonne-scale experiment which aims to search for neutrinoless double beta ($0\nu\beta\beta$) decay in the isotope $^{136}$Xe. The observation of $0\nu\beta\beta$ decay would demonstrate lepton number violation in weak processes and the Majorana nature of neutrinos. This would be an explicit signature of physics beyond the Standard Model and also may provide insight into the...
The nonlinear relationship between the form and function of physical structures in our built environment raises challenges for design. Modern design methods, such as topology optimization, provide structural solutions but obscure the relationship between the form of the solution and the formulation of the underlying design problem. Here, we show that embedding computational structure design in...
The Heisenberg-compass model on a square lattice offers a simple example of a frustrated magnet that exhibits the phenomenon of order by disorder (ObD). In this system the ordering direction is selected by quantum zero-point fluctuations for much of the phase diagram, providing a minimal context to explore manifestations of ObD, such as the presence of a pseudo-Goldstone gap. We explore the...
In this talk, we present a novel approach to fully renormalize observables such as theoretical predictions for cross sections and decay rates in particle physics. While renormalization techniques have been utilized to absorb infinities, the theoretical expressions for observables are still not fully renormlazed as they contain dependence on arbitrary subtraction schemes and scales. We resolve...
As teachers we want our students to learn. As students we want high marks. What classroom practices build a bridge between these wants? We will explore the role of questions and student cognition, white boards, and low-cost hands-on experiences to promote learning about the abstract concepts of electric fields and magnetic fields.
There has been noted concern regarding the retention, academic success, and motivation of students in STEM courses, especially physics. Many factors can impact students’ persistence in STEM courses, however students who do persist often find themselves underprepared for problem-solving within authentic settings. Problem solving is a highly valued 21st Century workforce skill in Canada...
The Large Hadron Collider restarted collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13.6 TeV in 2022, beginning the start of a planned 4-year Run 3. The ATLAS experiment is now commissioning several upgraded detector systems to best take advantage of the new dataset, including the New Small Wheels and phase-1 liquid argon electronics upgrade to which Canadian physicists made substantial contributions. This talk...
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is well known as a non-invasive diagnostic imaging technique available to clinical medicine. MRI provides high spatial resolution images with flexible soft tissue contrast as the signal encoding is more complicated than other imaging modalities.
Machine learning, especially deep learning, has become a popular research topic to solve nonlinear problems. It has...
Quantum black holes are one of the main playgrounds of any theory of quantum gravity. Describing such objects is a principal goal of these theories. I will review the fundamentals of analyzing black holes in non-perturbative canonical quantum gravity and briefly present some of the models arising from this approach. I will also present a short overview of some of the phenomenological aspects...
Phytoglycogen (PG) nanoparticles are hyperbranched, dendritic polymers of glucose that are produced as compact nanoparticles in the kernels of sweet corn. Our measurements of their structure, morphology, hydration and mechanical properties illustrate the unique properties of native PG nanoparticles: they are soft, porous, hairy and hydrated. These physical properties, combined with their...
The accurate measurement of time is of critical importance to society as it provides the means to synchronize events in our lives. The world has ever-increasing demands for precise time in fields such as automation, energy grids, smart cities, financial markets, fundamental research, and global positioning and navigation. Since the world moved to an atomic definition of time in the 1960s,...
During the past few decades, many astronomical and cosmological studies provided strong evidence for the existence of dark matter.
Though, to this day, we do not have any hint about what dark matter is, which motivates taking any opportunity to probe this question.
One possible solution is to extend the Standard Model with a new U(1) gauge group.
This introduces a new mediator: a light...
Single photon sources play a critical role in many emerging applications in quantum information science. Single photon quantum computing [1], and single photon quantum cryptography [2] both rely heavily on high-brightness, and high-indistinguishability single photon sources where subsequent single photons are identical in all degrees of freedom. In order to maximize indistinguishability, the...
A key question of modern physics concerns how the bulk of the universe's visible mass emerges from the Standard Model (SM). Some of this mass is generated by Higgs boson couplings to matter fields in the SM, but of the constituents of atomic matter, this suffices to explain only the mass of electrons in its entirety. The overwhelming majority of atomic mass resides in the nucleus, which is...
PICO-40L is a bubble chamber detector with a target material of superheated C3F8, located at the SNOLAB underground research facility outside Sudbury, Ontario. With its abundance of non-zero-spin fluorine nucleons in the detector target and its effective blindness to electron recoil interactions, it is projected to set world-leading exclusion limits in the spin-dependent...
There are many open questions in the field of hadronic structure, as the properties of constituent quarks and gluons (e.g. spin and mass) do not explicitly add up to the properties of hadrons. The pion is a simple hadron, consisting of only two valence quarks (up and down), which makes it an ideal candidate for studies of hadronic structure. The exclusive pion electroproduction reaction, with...
Introduction: Hyperpolarized 129Xe lung MRI is an efficient technique used to investigate and assess pulmonary diseases. However, the longitudinal observation of the emphysema progression using hyperpolarized gas MRI-based Apparent Diffusion Coefficient (ADC) can be problematic, as the disease-progression can lead to increasing unventilated-lung areas, which likely excludes the largest ADC...
Following the techniques of canonical loop quantum gravity, a full Thiemann regularization is performed on the scalar constraint of classical general relativity. The regularized Hamiltonian is then considered for a general spherically-symmetric spacetime, without recourse to additional gauge-fixing conditions commonly imposed to aid in computing the radial holonomies. By investigating the form...
High quality, uniform thin films of quantum materials are of extreme importance across many classes of device research. Minimizing energy consumption, while keeping flexibility in the deposition process, along with high structural stability, electrical and thermal conductivity, and optical transparency is critical in designing a reactor for quantum material thin film growth. Ultra-thin films...
This talk reviews recent studies of the dynamical and mechanical behaviour of nanocolloidal soft glassy materials using Rheo-XPCS, x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy with in situ rheology [1]. Rheo-XPCS allows for simultaneous studies of the mechanics and nanoscale dynamics of materials over a wide range of timescales from milliseconds to hours. As such, it is an outstanding tool to...
What is most important for non-physics specialists to learn from an introductory physics course? How can course design and assessment support learning transferable skills, especially in large “lecture” classes? We will discuss preliminary results from a collaborative research-practice self-study partnership focusing on Sealfon’s implementation of learner-centered approaches in a 200-student...
The DEAP-3600 experiment at SNOLAB primarily searches for Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter candidates through interactions with argon nuclei. The detector consists of 3.3 tonnes of liquid argon housed in a spherical acrylic vessel which is viewed by 255 photomultiplier tubes. Data have been taken stably from November 2016 to March 2020 and the detector is currently...
This project focuses on the investigation of trap energy levels introduced by radiation damage in epitaxial p-type silicon. Using 6-inch wafers of various boron doping concentrations (1e13, 1e14, 1e15, 1e16, and 1e17 cm$^{−3}$) with a 50 µm epitaxial layer, multiple iterations of test structures consisting of Schottky and pn-junction diodes of different sizes and flavours are being fabricated...
Top quark being the heaviest elementary particle, and the only quark which decays in its bare form, has the potential to reveal crucial information on particle dynamics. For example, precise measurement of top quark mass is needed to understand the vacuum structure, including its stability. Having the strongest coupling with Higgs boson, it can reveal information related to the electroweak...
INTRODUCTION: A non-invasive imaging technique inhaled hyperpolarized (HP) 129Xe magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is presently employed to assess lung structure and function1. It is possible to quantify the ventilation/perfusion (V/P) of the lungs simultaneously using this MRI technique because the solubility of xenon in lung tissues is higher compared to other imaging gases. This measurement...
Caustics are regions of high intensity created generically by the natural focusing of waves, and are universally described by catastrophe theory. Each distinct class of catastrophe is uniquely described by its own diffraction pattern, the simplest two being the Airy and Pearcey functions. A more exotic form of logarithmic wave singularity occurs near event horizons, which have acoustic...
HELIX, the High Energy Light Isotope eXperiment, is a balloon-borne payload designed to measure the isotopic abundances of light cosmic ray nuclei. Precise measurements of the 10Be nuclear isotope from 0.2 GeV/n to 10 GeV/n will help study propagation processes of cosmic rays. These measurements will allow the refining of propagation models, critical for interpreting excesses and unexpected...
As the heaviest known fundamental particle, the top quark plays a special role in many theories of new physics beyond the Standard Model. Reconstruction of top anti-top pair production to the best possible resolution is therefore crucial to enhancing our sensitivity to Beyond Standard Model effects in precision measurements and searches at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), from improved mass...
Photoproduction mechanisms studied in the GlueX experiment allows the mapping of light mesons in unprecedented detail with particular interest in exotic meson candidates. This is achieved by impinging an 8.2-8.8 GeV linearly polarized photon beam on a liquid hydrogen target. The measurement of beam asymmetry $\Sigma$ will help constrain quasi-particle t-channel exchange processes using Regge...
Entropy production is a necessary ingredient for addressing the over-population of thermal relics. It is widely employed in particle physics models for explaining the origin of dark matter. A longlived particle that decays to the known particles, while dominating the universe, plays the role of the dilutor. We point out the impact of its partial decay to dark matter on the primordial matter...
Since the pandemic forced everything online, there have been rapid and significant changes to the way many of us have been teaching and learning. As more options for in-person activities become available again, we need to consider which elements of learning in the online environment benefit students and are worth keeping. Beginning in Fall 2020, we distributed anonymous online surveys (Fall...
Thermal transport in low-dimensional systems such as nanowires is interesting for applications involving system design at the nanoscale, but the effects of changes like the shape of a nanowire are not completely understood. In this work the behaviour of the thermal conductance of nanowires is investigated by introducing a single kink into an otherwise straight nanowire. The angle of this kink...
Introduction: It has recently been shown1,2 that combining Compressed-Sensing with the Stretched-Exponential Model (SEM) can significantly increase SNR of accelerated/undersampled MR images. The reconstruction uses an exponentially decaying signal trend across a group of images assumed to represent the decaying density of resonant isotope in lungs after each wash-out breath....
The KaonLT/PionLT Collaboration probes hadron structure by measuring deep exclusive meson production reactions at Jefferson Lab. A set of high momentum, high resolution spectrometers in Hall C allow for precision measurements from which form factors and other observables can be extracted. One possible measurement is the beam spin asymmetry, which describes the fractional difference in...
The SNO+ Experiment is a versatile multipurpose neutrino detector situated at SNOLAB, with the primary goal of searching for neutrinoless double beta decay. After a successful operating phase as a water Cherenkov detector, the SNO+ target medium was switched to a liquid scintillator to increase the light yield of the detector, thereby enabling a much richer physics programme. In addition to...
Classical experiments, typically performed using bulk continuous matter can be applied for granular systems to better understand their properties, and explore the analogies between granular and bulk continuous systems. While the classic pendant drop experiment can be
used to measure the interfacial tension between fluids, here we perform the granular version of the pendant drop experiment....
We use a novel approach to numerically calculate Fast-Oscillating Integrals (FOI) using the Picard-Lefschetz theory. In this theory, analytic oscillatory integrals are converted into sums of convex integrals by deforming the integration domain in the complex plane. Feldbrugge, Pen, and Turok 2019 introduced a new numerical integrator to evaluate the interference effects near caustics in lenses...
Students who excel in mathematics and physics in high school often consider engineering or physics for university-level studies. But how do they make their choice? How can the education system better advise them to choose the career that is best for each one of them individually? We present results from a survey on how first-year university students choose between the physical sciences and...
We use the newly proposed Energy Mover’s Distance as a measure of jet isotropy to define new jet substructure observables for quark/gluon discrimination and identifying hadronically-decaying top quarks with large transverse momentum. We assess their effectiveness by comparing them with other classifiers. The quark/gluon study is conducted at hadron level while the top quark study is conducted...
Electrohydrodynamics of droplets immersed in an immiscible carrier fluid was first explored in a pioneering paper by G. I. Taylor who formulated the weakly conducting or leaky dielectric model and predicted the steady drop shape in the small-deformation limit. Contemporary literature in electrohydrodynamic studies focuses primarily on the deformations of single droplets. On the other hand, the...
The $t$-channel single-top quark production is observed for the first time at a centre-of-mass energy of 5.02 TeV using proton-proton collision data collected by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The observation is made using an event selection optimized for the $l$+jets decay topology of the single-top process, which requires candidate events to have exactly one charged lepton...
Hadrons are typically described using "quenched" constituent quark models, which posit a Hamiltonian acting on the state space of the valence quarks, neglecting mixing of higher Fock states. In recent years, experimentalists have observed states which are not well characterized by these models, motivating quark modellers to examine the effects of unquenching. The resultant mass shifts throw...
The ocean Sound Speed Profile directly affects how acoustic waves propagate in the ocean. As a result, knowledge of the sound speed profile is important in many underwater acoustic applications including acoustic imaging, source localization, and underwater communication. Measurement of ocean sound speed can also provide an indirect measure of ocean temperature using the close dependence of...
Nanothermometry is a powerful tool that allows for controlling temperature at the nanoscale, and thus finds applications in research fields ranging from biomedicine to high-power microelectronics. Typical nanothermometry techniques employ secondary nanothermometers, where each individual nanosensor must be individually calibrated—ideally, both off- and in-situ. Here we utilize fluorescent...
Darkside-20k, planned to be constructed at the LNGS underground laboratory in Italy, is a forthcoming detector that aims at using a Liquid Argon (LAr) target to detect the scattering of dark matter particles from argon atoms. The detector will collect an exposure of 200 tonne-years while keeping the instrumental background level in the WIMP search region of interest to a minimum.
At the...
TRIUMF, Canada’s Particle Accelerator Centre, delivers beams for fundamental science and a wide range of accelerator-based applications.
World-leading in radioisotope beam production, TRIUMF-ISAC is the only ISOL facility that is routinely operating targets under particle irradiation in the high-power regime in excess of 10 kW. TRIUMF’s current flagship project ARIEL, Advanced Rare IsotopE...
Hyperpolarized (HP) gas MRI was previously developed to provide a way to study whole lung ventilation, alveolar morphometry and gas-exchange, with the first demonstration of 129Xe MRI lung imaging nearly 30 years ago. In the ensuing decades, HP gas MRI research has demonstrated that inhaled HP gas lung MRI provides unique measurements for a number of pulmonary diseases including chronic...
The ATLAS experiment recorded 140 ifb in the LHC’s $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV Run 2, and the analysis of this high-quality and well-understood dataset continues. Canadian physicists are involved in all aspects of data analysis, from the trigger systems to reconstruction to physics results. Recent results, including highlights from Higgs properties and precision measurements of the Standard Model, as...
What is a quantum black hole? How does it form and how long does it last? I will provide an answer to these questions via an effective equation that describes gravitational collapse of dust with quantum corrections. Solving this equation reveals that black holes end in a shock wave after a time of order mass squared.
The weak mixing angle can be measured in parity-violating elastic electron-proton scattering. The aim of the P2 experiment is a very precise measurement of the weak mixing angle with an accuracy of 0.15% at a low four-momentum transfer of Q2 = 4.5x10^{-3} GeV^2. In combination with existing measurements at the Z pole with comparable accuracy, this comprises a test of the standard model with a...
Intricate periodic and aperiodic ordered phases have been discovered in various soft matter systems such as supramolecular assemblies, surfactant solutions and block copolymers, underscoring the universality of emergent order in condensed matter. Theoretical study of block copolymer systems has been successful, revealing that the formation of complex ordered phases could be regulated by...
The ways Physics and Astronomy are traditionally taught in Canadian Universities typically ignores millennia of knowledges of Indigenous Peoples. This is by design as textbooks and curriculum tend to build upon a European view of the growth of science, physics, and astronomy that centers one perspective. However, we can build a more diverse and improved curriculum by considering Indigenous...
The far-infrared spectrum of CD$_{3}$SH has been recorded from 60 to 450 cm$^{-1}$ at the FIR beamline of the Canadian Light Source in Saskatoon in order to explore the evolution of the torsional structure in climbing up the ladder of torsional states. So far, the torsion-rotation levels have been extensively mapped up to the third excited torsional state, and we hope to push the assignments...
Authors fabricated a unique plasmonic structure using gold nanorods (GNRs) along the length of a tapered fiber using a well-known phenomenon called “Optical tweezing”. The plasmonic structure, known as an optical fiber probe, was used to detect chemicals at lower concentrations. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) technique was used to obtain the data for chemicals adsorbed on the...
The high-entropy oxide (HEO) Mg$_{0.2}$Co$_{0.2}$Ni$_{0.2}$Cu$_{0.2}$Zn$_{0.2}$O is synthesized by annealing equimolar mixtures of the parent binary oxides MgO, CoO, CuO, NiO, and ZnO to 1000 K and quenching to 295 K. X-ray diffraction shows HEO crystallizes in a single-phase rocksalt structure. The cations randomly occupy the $(000)$ site, while the oxygen sublattice is ordered. Lattice...
The Cryogenic Underground TEst facility (CUTE) is located 2 km underground at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Ontario. The response of cryogenic germanium and silicon semiconductor detectors is characterised through testing at CUTE prior to use in the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) experiment. SNOLAB and CUTE together provide a low background environment for testing, shielded from cosmic...
High Voltage Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (HVMAPS) are a new type of electron detector. This hybrid pixel detector combines the semiconductor sensor elements that detect high energy particles with the readout electronics in one element. The demand for fast, high resolution and low noise detectors by experiments conducted at the LHC initiated the development of hybrid pixel detectors, first...
Authors demonstrated a passively Q-Switched pulse laser by using an aqueous solution of colloidal gold nanorods (GNRs) and Poly vinyl Alcohol (PVA) as a Saturable Absorber (SA) in a fiber ring laser cavity. GNRs, due to its unique plasmonic and nonlinear properties, has the potential to generate ultrashort pulses. In addition, a tunable laser can be developed using a mixture of GNRs with...
Recent experimental and theoretical studies have shown that many ordered structures, ranging in complexity from simple lamellae to complex Frank-Kasper (FK) phases, can be formed from diblock copolymers. In many of the experimental studies the polymeric samples used in are polydisperse, however most theoretical studies have examined monodisperse systems. Therefore, to conduct theoretical...
The detection of dark matter (DM) is currently one of the leading challenges in particle physics. While many experiments attempt to detect dark matter in a variety of ways, the DEAP-3600 experiment uses roughly 3.3 tonnes of liquid argon in an attempt to detect the scintillation signal produced by a dark matter particle scattering on an argon nucleus. DEAP-3600 uses pulse shape discrimination...
I will discuss a class of time-dependent, asymptotically flat and spherically symmetric metrics which model gravitational collapse in quantum gravity developed by myself and the other listed authors. Motivating the work was the intuition that quantum gravity should not exhibit curvature singularities and indeed, the metrics lead to singularity resolution with horizon formation and evaporation...
Electron objects are used in a large fraction of ATLAS publications. Better identification implemented in the electron triggers would allow to lower their transverse momentum threshold and increase their acceptance. In particular, analysis with many electrons in the final state such as the ones studying the Higgs, the W boson or Beyond de Standard Model phenomena can suffer from large,...
The brain is made of billions of cells called neurons, which are responsible for conducting electrical signals between the central nervous system and the rest of the body. The axon is the thread-like projection of the neuronal cell body and is usually insulated by the myelin sheath. The two hemispheres of the brain are connected by a white matter tract called the corpus callosum and the...
nEXO is a planned next-generation neutrinoless double beta decay experiment, designed to be at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. Within the international nuclear and astroparticle physics communities, we strive to be a leader and role model in the areas of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion while drawing inspiration from the trailblazers who came before us. In 2018, nEXO wrote and adopted its...
To cope with the increased occupancy and radiation dose expected at the High-Luminosity LHC, the ATLAS experiment will replace its current Inner Detector with the Inner Tracker (ITk), containing all-silicon pixel and strip sub-detectors. The strip detectors will be built from modules each consisting of one or two n+-in-p sensors, one or two PCB hybrids containing the front-end electronics, and...
Understanding and controlling the liquid to crystal transformation is a central topic for numerous natural phenomena and technological applications. The first step of crystallization is the birth of critical nuclei. Their size, structure and rate at which critical nuclei appear and grow are fundamental parameters for understanding and controlling crystallization. Although nucleation rates can...
In general, black holes interact with external matter and fields. A four-dimensional static black hole within a static external axisymmetric gravitational field can be described by a Weyl solution of the Einstein equations. These results can be extended to higher dimensions using the generalized Weyl form. Various studies have been devoted to investigate the properties of the distorted black...
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment or DUNE is an ambitious accelerator based neutrino oscillation experiment that is not only able to resolve the mass hierarchy, but also has excellent potential to measure the charge-parity violating angle in the neutrino sector. DUNE will constrain systematic uncertainties by building a suite of detectors close to the neutrino source (near detector) and...
We will report on the development of efforts to create new spectroscopic reference data to help astronomers to find exoplanets. Astronomers routinely observe spectra of the molecule iron hydride (FeH) in the atmosphere of M-class stars. By measuring the Doppler shifts of transitions in FeH, they can determine a star’s radial velocity. If a star has an exoplanet, the star and the exoplanet...
The ABCStar (ATLAS Binary Chip – Star Version) is a front-end readout chip for the silicon-strips portion of the ATLAS Inner Tracker (ITk) upgrade. These radiation-hard application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are implemented in a commercial 130 nm CMOS process and are intended to handle the high rate of collision data at the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), and last throughout the...
Undergraduate research activities, strong mentorship and peer support have been demonstrated to improve the experiences of students studying science. This is especially important for Indigenous students for whom the transition from a high school setting, where students feel comfortable and may be embedded in robust Indigenous community, to university, which can be isolating and challenging....
Many soft matter theoretical problems can be reformulated into minimizing a cost function, in which the field-based physical properties (the target functions) are adjusted to achieve the minimum. The Neural-network approach approximates the target functions by forward-feeding neural networks and the machine-learning techniques adjust the network parameters to produce the approximation to the...
Approximately 1 in 6 people globally are affected by a Neurological disorder. Previous research has linked numerous Neurological disorders post-mortem to abnormalities in axon distribution and integrity within neural white matter tracts. Therefore, it is of high interest to investigate methods that will eventually be able to measure axon diameters in white matters tracts in live brains. This...
The international CALICE collaboration is dedicated to detector R&D in calorimetry for new experiments. All project concepts now use high granularity to maximally profit from Particle Flow Algorithms and thus improve jet energy resolution, device versatility and response performance. A review of innovative analog or digital detector types, using technologies such as silicon, scintillators or...
Understanding the kinetics and thermodynamics of the crystallization processes involved in carbon-rich materials is a critical knowledge gap that hinders a realistic assessment of the risks and benefits of potential climate-change-mitigation strategies [1]. Toward this end, we investigated the thermal and aqueous stabilities of single-phase and multi-phase mixtures of calcium carbonate and...
The TRIUMF Ultracold Advanced Neutron (TUCAN) source, when completed, will be a world-leading source of ultracold neutrons. The source is a unique combination of a spallation target coupled to a superfluid helium converter. A key component of the source is the liquid deuterium moderator, which surrounds the superfluid helium converter. The goal of the LD$_2$ moderator is to provide a high...
In order to search for the physics beyond the Standard Model at the precision frontier, it is sometimes essential to account for Next-to-Next-Leading Order (NNLO) corrections theoretical calculations. Using the covariant approach, we calculated the QED type leptonic tensor up to quadratic (one loop squared) NNLO (alpha cube) order, which can be used for the processes like (electron-proton) and...
In recent years, with the progress in gravitational wave astronomy and subsequent importance of binary black hole mergers, there has been an increased focus on numerical simulations of these events. However, the most common surface of interest in black holes—the event horizon—is difficult to track numerically, as it is defined teleologically from future boundary conditions. Instead, the...
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a powerful imaging technique for diagnosing disease. One major drawback of currently available MR systems is the cost of the high-field (>1T), general use magnets that are the current clinical standard. Thus, interest has grown in developing smaller, low-field, and diagnosis specific MR systems. These systems can reduce costs, and increase the accessibility...
The Belle II experiment, based at SuperKEKB, is collecting e+e- collision data at the Upsilon(4S) resonance energy. The Belle II physics program is enabled by the (all-time high) record luminosity of SuperKEKB; a metric that also incurs record high beam background in the detector. Accurate simulation of physics events in the detector during collisions is vital to obtaining quality physics...
The Hyper-Kamiokande (HK) is a next generation neutrino detector that will require new detector technologies and percent-level calibration to achieve its full physics potential. To achieve this goal, a 50-ton scale Water Cherenkov Test Experiment (WCTE) has been proposed and is scheduled to be installed at the T9 test beam experimental area in CERN, with the run starting in summer of 2024. To...
Laser-cooled molecules exhibit several features that make them attractive virtual laboratories for probing new physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM). Various proposed extensions to the Standard Model predict non-zero values for the electron's Electric Dipole Moment (eEDM). To date, no experiment has measured a non-zero eEDM; however measurements placing an upper bound on the value for the...
New neutron sources are needed both for Canada and internationally as access to reactor based neutrons shrinks. Compact Accelerator-based Neutron Sources (CANS) offer the possibility of an intense source of pulsed neutrons with a capital cost significantly lower than spallation sources. In an effort to close the neutron gap in Canada a prototype, Canadian compact accelerator-based neutron...
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada called on post-secondary institutions to integrate Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms” (TRC, 2015). At the University of Windsor, there is a broad initiative to include Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing in as many courses as programs as possible. I present the first attempt at indigenizing and decolonizing the...
The p-doping of organic semiconductors (OSCs) for tuning their electronic structure in opto-electronic applications is typically done by adding strong molecular acceptors as dopants to initiate charge transfer. I will summarize the current understanding of the phenomena observed upon molecularly p-doping conjugated polymers (CPs) and molecules (COMs), where two different competing scenarios...
The Hyper-Kamiokande project plans to measure the phenomenon of neutrino oscillations with unprecedented precision, at the 1% systematic uncertainty level or less. To do so, multiple water cherenkov detectors will be deployed: near and far detectors, as well as a test experiment (WCTE) for the testing of new technologies and improvement of physics understanding. These detectors will use...
Self-intersecting marginally outer-trapped surfaces (MOTSs) have been found to play a vital role in binary black hole merger processes through numerical simulations [Pook-Kolb et. al. arXiv:1903.05626]. The search for such exotic MOTSs can also be found in analytical black hole solutions, such as the simplest (Schwarzschild) black hole [Booth et. al., arXiv:2005.05350]. Ongoing work continues...
The analysis of collision events at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) presents significant computational challenges, particularly due to the need for large amounts of Monte Carlo simulation to reduce statistical uncertainties in the simulated datasets. The most computationally intensive task in Monte Carlo detector simulation is the simulation of high-energy particles interacting with the...
AI and machine learning – specifically neural network (NN) based approaches – have become an indispensable tool in many areas of physics research. Nevertheless, there is still much to learn about NNs at the fundamental level and for application specific methodologies. In this talk, I will discuss some of the work we have done both using physics applications to study how neural networks learn...
The Off-Line Ion Sources (OLIS) facility is part of TRIUMF’s world-class Isotope Separator and Accelerator (ISAC) complex, specializing in nuclear and particle physics research. Delivery of stable beams from OLIS and rare isotope beams from ISAC and eventually ARIEL (the Advanced Rare Isotope Laboratory) to various experiments with desired intensity and quality requires a complex tune of many...
Performing measurements on anti-matter atoms is an alluring proposition for studying the symmetries between matter and anti-matter; however, it presents a number of technical challenges. The ALPHA group has met these challenges and successfully trapped large numbers of anti-hydrogen atoms, opening the door for many such measurements. The new ALPHA-g experiment has the ability to measure the...
discussion & networking opportunities for session close out
We discuss a systematic error in time-resolved optical conductivity measurements that becomes important at high pump intensities. We show that common optical nonlinearities can distort the photoconductivity depth profile, and by extension distort the photoconductivity spectrum. We show evidence that this distortion is present in existing measurements on $\text{K}_{3}\text{C}_{60}$, and...
In order to make new discoveries within the realm of particle physics it is imperative that we are able to compare data collected using the ATLAS detector with theoretical predictions as well as results from other experiments. The process of correcting ATLAS data such that the effects of the detector are eliminated is known as unfolding. At present, commonly used unfolding methods require data...
For the last few decades and especially since the first detection of gravitational waves, black hole mergers have been a core research area in general relativity. However, the process by which two black hole horizons merge is only now starting to be well-understood. In numerical studies of apparent horizon evolution, self-intersecting marginally outer-trapped surfaces (MOTS) were found and...
There exists a large body of indirect evidence for the existence of Dark Matter (DM) but, to date, no direct evidence has been found. Because of this, the wide range of possible parameter space that would then be used to explain dark matter’s observed effects has given rise to a large number of models. One possible form of DM is strongly self-interacting DM, which includes Strongly Interacting...
The ALPHA-g experiment at CERN aims to test the fundamental symmetry between matter and antimatter by precisely measuring the effect of Earth's gravity on antihydrogen atoms. To achieve this goal, the experiment uses a radial Time Projection Chamber (rTPC) as the primary detector for particle tracking. The rTPC provides a high spatial resolution of the antihydrogen annihilation vertices, which...
The notion of wave-particle duality is fundamental in the quantum mechanical description of matter. This duality asserts that matter sometimes behaves like a particle and sometimes behaves like a wave, called de Broglie waves. Recent advances in methods to coherently manipulate de Broglie waves of atoms have enabled a new generation of atom interferometers with unique capability to address...
Uncovering the nature of dark matter is one of the most important goals of particle physics. Light bosonic particles, such as the dark photon, are well-motivated candidates: they are generally long lived, weakly-interacting, and naturally produced in the early universe. LAMPOST (Light A' Multilayer Periodic Optical SNSPD Target) experiment searches for dark photon dark matter in the eV mass...
Innovation in materials science and engineering resides in our ability to control the structure of materials at the nanoscale in order to design advanced materials with outstanding functional properties (electrical, optical, magnetic, photocatalytic, etc.). One of the most powerful means to arrange matter at the nanoscale is to use laser produced plasmas due to their exceptional ability to...
Topological semimetals display a range of novel transport phenomena, including enormous magnetoresistance and mobilities. Using Raman spectroscopy we have uncovered a novel mechanism for phonons to play a central role in this phenomena. Specifically we demonstrate the phonon-electron scattering time far exceeds the phonon-phonon. As such the momentum and energy typically lost to the lattice is...
This talk reviews selected topics of the Fundamental Symmetries sector of Nuclear Physics from the theoretical point of view. It focuses on three themes of interest to the Canadian experimental community: electric dipole moments, neutral currents, and beta decays. Lepton flavor violation, where major new international experiments are about to come online, will also be discussed.
The inclusion of thermodynamic pressure has been one of the major developments in black hole thermodynamics in recent years. By incorporating pressure, black holes are now known to exhibit behaviour corresponding to that seen in a broad variety of chemical systems, including liquid-gas type transitions, reentrant phase behaviour, polymer-like transitions, superfluid phase behaviour, and...
Opening remarks
I will present a unique quantitative single-molecule imaging platform called CLiC (Convex Lens-induced Confinement) which enables simultaneous measurements of the size, mRNA-payload, and dynamic properties of mRNA-based therapies and vaccines in controlled, cell-like conditions (Kamanzi et al, ACS Nano 2021). Here, we apply single-molecule biophysics to help characterize and understand the...
Dr. Phil Kaye graduated in the first PhD cohort from Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing in 2007. From 2004 to 2018, he served in a variety of roles with the Government of Canada’s Communications Security Establishment, primarily as a trusted advisor on the impacts of quantum technologies. From 2004 to 2010, he was the Program Reporter for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s...
Relativistic quantum metrology is a framework that not only accounts for both relativistic and quantum effects when performing measurements and estimations, but further improves upon classical estimation protocols by exploiting quantum relativistic properties of a given system.
Here I present recent developments in the Fisher information analysis associated with black hole spacetimes. I...
Spectroscopic techniques have made remarkable progress in the past decades have played a critical role in advancing our understanding of quantum and topological materials. However, the interpretation of the spectroscopic data and information extraction processes can be highly nontrivial. In this symposium talk, we introduce machine learning as an auxiliary technique for various experiments...
The field of nanotechnology has rapidly expanded over the past few decades due to the unique physical, chemical, mechanical, and electrical properties of nanoscale materials. Today, nanomaterials are applied in numerous fields, including catalysis, drug delivery, and microelectronics, among others. Plasma-based methods have shown great potential for use in the synthesis of nanomaterials via...
SENSEI (Sub-Electron Noise Skipper Experimental Instrument) is a direct detection dark matter experiment with detectors operating at Fermilab and at the SNOLAB underground facility. The experiment consists of silicon Skipper-CCD sensors that make multiple non-destructive measurements of the charge contained in each pixel, reducing the readout noise to a level that allows for resolution of...
Experimental tests of fundamental symmetries using nuclei and other particles subject to the strong nuclear force have led to the discovery of parity (P) violation and the discovery of charge-parity (CP) violation. It is believed that additional sources of CP-violation may be needed to explain the apparent scarcity of antimatter in the observable universe. A particularly sensitive and...
During simulations of a binary black hole collision, the final (post-merger) black hole horizon exhibits a decaying oscillation. There is also an observable gravitational wave signal from this black hole ringdown. Then it is natural to think that the oscillation generates the gravitational wave signal. However, this is not the case. By definition the black hole horizon (either event or...
Since its inception in 1999, Plasmionique has been carrying out collaborative research with Canadian Universities, national laboratories as well as international groups and companies. Such collaborations have allowed Plasmionique to remain at forefront of technological development and fulfill its mission of proliferating and commercializing plasma technology as an environmentally clean...
Dr. Rezaee earned his PhD in Physics from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 2015, and subsequently held postdoc positions at Texas A&M University and the University of Ottawa. While at the University of Ottawa, Dr. Rezaee played a crucial role in establishing the Joint Centre for Extreme Photonics (JCEP) lab, a collaborative initiative with the NRC. His academic pursuits revolve...
Even though dilute (unentangled) polymer solutions cannot act as gel-like sieving media, it has been shown that they can be used to separate DNA molecules in capillary electrophoresis. The separation then comes from sporadic and independent polyelectrolyte-polymer collisions. Here we explore such collisions in nanochannels (i.e., channels that are smaller than the normal size of the polymers),...
We derive a "classical-quantum" approximation scheme for a broad class of bipartite quantum systems. In this approximation, one subsystem's evolution is governed by classical equations of motion with quantum corrections, and the other subsystem evolves quantum mechanically with equations of motion informed by the classical degrees of freedom. Similar approximations are common when...
Nanocomposite (NC) thin-films are widely studied due to the multifunctional properties they can develop (optical, electrical, mechanical). A lot of methods are under development with a real attraction for processes at atmospheric pressure, such as dielectric barrier discharge (DBD).
Recently, a new process of nanoparticles injection in plasmas has been developed [1]. This method consists in...
Topological semimetals can host novel fermionic particles whose intriguing interactions and many-body phases can be studied experimentally. I will discuss the particularly exciting class of Rarita-Schwinger-Weyl semimetals hosting spin-3/2 electrons with linear dispersion at a four-fold band crossing point, realized experimentally in quantum materials in the last years. I will combine symmetry...
In the presence of radiation from bright astrophysical sources at radio frequencies, axion dark matter can undergo stimulated decay to two nearly back-to-back photons, meaning that bright sources could have counterimages in other parts of the sky. The counterimages will be spectrally distinct from backgrounds, taking the form of a narrow radio line centered at half the axion mass with a...
In recent years, nanofluidic devices have proven extremely useful for characterizing the physical behaviour of biopolymers such as DNA confined to narrow channels and micron-sized cavities. Insight gleaned from experiments using nanochannels is valuable for applications such as optical mapping of elongated DNA. Likewise, studies of multiple DNA molecules in nanocavities have provided insight...
The MOLLER experiment at Jefferson Lab aims for an ultra-precise determination of the weak mixing angle $\sin^2\theta_W$ by measuring the parity-violating asymmetry $A_{\rm PV}$ in polarized electron-electron (Moller) scattering. For the approved 88 calendar week run, the proposed accuracy on $A_{\rm PV}$ is 0.7 parts per billion corresponding to an overall relative measurement accuracy of...
Dr. Nipun Vats is the Assistant Deputy Minister, Science and Research Sector, at the Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. In this role, he is responsible for leading the development of federal policy and investments in post-secondary research.
He has held a variety of positions within the Canadian federal government, including in the Privy Council Office and...
Marginally outer trapped tubes are one of the essential tools to understand the dynamical evolution of Black Holes. In this talk, I will present a new symplectic formalism that applies to various spacetimes containing a BH. This framework allows studying charges, flux laws, and higher multiple moments. All this is directly linked to the study of gravitational waves.
In this talk, we will discuss a model of quantum gravity in which dynamical spacetime arises as a collective phenomenon of underlying quantum matter. In the model, the pattern of entanglement formed across local Hilbert spaces determines the dimension, topology and geometry of an emergent spacetime. After discussing the general structure of the model, we will describe the dynamics of a...
Nitrogen doped graphene, or N-graphene, is a promising material for a wide range of applications such as supercapacitors, optoelectronic devices, and biosensors. Nitrogen plasmas have been proved to be an excellent path to generate N-graphene from polycrystalline monolayer graphene films grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). In this study, CVD graphene has been exposed to low-frequency...
The MOLLER (Measurement Of a Lepton Lepton Electroweak Reaction) experiment, in preparation at Jefferson Lab, aims to constrain physics beyond the Standard Model using parity-violating Moller scattering at 11 GeV. The parity-violating asymmetry between the cross-sections for right- and left-handed helicity beam electrons scattered from the atomic electrons in a liquid hydrogen target is...
One intriguing feature of 2D hyperbolic-lattice models is that their band theories live in hypertoric Brillouin zones. The high-dimensional band structures and the dimensional mismatch between real and momentum spaces present uncharted territory beyond Euclidean topological phases. This work investigates topological phases exhibited by hyperbolic Haldane models, which are generalizations of...
The Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) is a direct detection experiment, optimized for low-mass dark matter searches. Comprised of silicon and germanium crystal bolometers, the experiment utilizes transition-edge sensor (TES) technology to measure small heat signals that result from particle interactions with the bulk crystal. While the experiment is small compared to ton-scale...
Nucleic acids are the most basic molecules of life, being tasked with storing and transmitting genetic information in all living organisms. Both DNA and RNA are composed of fundamental building blocks that each include a nucleobase (A, G, C, T/U), sugar ([deoxy]ribose), and phosphate moiety. To enhance nucleic acid programmability and stability, and aid the formation of functional 3D shapes,...
A low-temperature plasma (LTP) is being advanced as an alternative radiation source that offers unique chemical properties owned by a variety of reactive plasma species (RPS), such as radicals, electrons, and excited species, delivered and formed in media upon exposure. Our current research explores the possibility of implementing DNA and its damage as a probe for specific plasma diagnostics...
Majorana zero modes appear at the edges of topological superconducting wires as part of the bulk-boundary correspondence in these systems. Thanks to topology, Majoranas are robust against weak perturbations and this makes them promising candidates for qubit building blocks. In Majorana-based qubits quantum information is stored non-locally, avoiding many sources of decoherence. In such...
Antimatter and gravity are subjects of two of the biggest mysteries in physics: How can we explain the observed excess of matter over antimatter in the universe? And, how can the theories of gravity and quantum mechanics be unified? Antihydrogen, as the simplest purely antimatter atomic system, is a natural candidate for experimentally testing some fundamental theories related to these...
High energy neutrinos from cosmic sources are one of the most exciting subjects for study in particle physics. They allow access to energy ranges otherwise unobtainable and since neutrinos point back to their origin, they allow deep insights into the sources of the highest energy processes in the universe.
The P-ONE collaboration is aiming to construct a large scale ocean based neutrino...
Quantum chemistry has been identified as one of the prime applications for quantum computers. At present, the majority of quantum algorithm developments have the Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) architecture in mind, for which it is important to design quantum circuits with low circuit depth to minimize noise and error propagation. In this presentation, I will present a modular...
A quantum physicist by training, Dr. Martin Laforest spent his career ensuring quantum technologies have a disruptive, yet positive impact on industry and society. Martin is currently managing partner for Quantacet, an early stage, quantum-focused investment fund and the director of Quantum Strategy for ACET, a Sherbrooke-based deep tech incubator offering specific mentoring tailored to...
Topological nanowires, topological materials confined in one dimension (1D), hold great promise for robust and scalable quantum computing and low-dissipation interconnect applications, which will transform current computing technologies. To do so, research in topological nanowires must continue to improve their synthesis and properties.
In this talk, I will discuss my group’s efforts to...
Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo have confidently detected dozens of gravitational wave (GW) signals from colliding black holes and neutron stars. As these GW detectors improve and more are added to the global network, the expected rate of detected events will increase (with the cube of the sensitive range) and our ability to constrain the properties, including likely sky location, will...
Within the past decade micro-plasma jets in contact with liquids have been the focus of international research. They have shown great potential in applications ranging from surface treatment to medicine. To be able to control these jets for precise application, a fundamental understanding of the underlying processes is required. For this, detailed diagnostics need to be performed, which are...
The search for the invisible dark matter particle is complicated due to the uncertainties in its distribution in our Galaxy. An accurate determination of the dark matter phase space distribution in the Solar neighborhood is crucial for the correct analysis and interpretation of data from dark matter direct detection experiments. Massive satellites such as the Large Magellanic Cloud can impact...
The TRIUMF UltraCold Advanced Neutron (TUCAN) Collaboration is developing a new ultracold neutron (UCN) source for installation at TRIUMF. High energy neutrons will be produced by directing protons from the TRIUMF cyclotron onto a tungsten target. The neutrons will undergo moderation in two steps to reduce their energy, first in a heavy water then in a liquid deuterium moderator. The...
Thomson scattering (TS), the elastic scattering of light photons by charged particles, is a powerful diagnostic for the measurements of electron properties (density and temperature) in low-temperature plasmas (LTP). It is in fact one of the few diagnostics capable of providing simultaneously electron density (ne) and electron temperature (Te) information at the nanosecond timescale. As a...
Hypoxia is a characteristic pathophysiological property of advanced solid tumours which influences aggressiveness and resistance to treatment. Real-time measurement of tumour oxygenation is thus vital for stratifying treatment plans by hypoxic severity and monitoring variations in partial pressure of oxygen (pO$_2$) caused by high energy X-ray and other photonic therapies. Azobenzene...
Nicholas obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from Simon Fraser University, where his research focused on the numerical and phenomenological modeling of impurities in superconductors. In 2021, he joined Photonic, a full-stack quantum computing company based in British Columbia, as its first Quantum Software Engineer, leading the development of a laboratory measurement and control system. Realizing...
Understanding and controlling structural organization mechanisms is a key challenge in producing synthetic materials that mimic the complexity seen in organisms. This talk will present recent advances in controlling the local organization of colloidal building blocks, and a "pre-assembly" approach to produce hierarchically-structured materials.
I will give an overview of pseudo-Dirac dark matter, a scenario where a small Majorana mass splits charged Dirac dark matter into two nearly degenerate states. A longtime favourite of model-builders, this dark matter candidate has a rich phenomenology that still has yet to be fully characterized. I will discuss a few mechanisms for producing this kind of dark matter in the early universe, and...
The planned upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider to quadruple the luminosity requires a substantial corresponding upgrade to the ATLAS detector in order to continue to keep up with the challenging experimental conditions that high luminosity imposes. Canada is participating in a wide range of these planned upgrades, with a particular focus on a new silicon strip detector and upgraded...
The scaling of interconnect wiring in integrated circuits leads to increasing resistivity of Cu wires and degrades the chip power-performance significantly. Current research on alternative interconnect conductors is largely limited to conventional metals for mitigating the growing line resistance. Here we explore topological conductors as a potential solution. Using CoSi and NbAs as examples,...
Non-equilibrium effects are ubiquitous in laboratory plasmas and need to be considered to optimize the reactor performance for specific applications. In the low temperature plasma (LTP) community, there are on-going discussions on how to define reaction mechanisms and verify them. Such efforts would allow going toward predictive modelling and accelerate innovation. In this contribution, we...
The pursuit of fundamental interactions requires ever increasing precision in theory and experiment. Ion-trapping techniques have been deployed and pioneered to investigate radioactive nuclides at the TITAN-TRIUMF facility. Experiments include precision mass spectrometry of superallowed $\beta$ emitters to investigate isospin symmetry and to test the unitarity of the quark-mixing matrix. To...
Catalina holds a MSc. in Electronics from Los Andes University and Engineering Diploma from IMT Atlantique in France, with a research focus on autonomous systems. She’s currently Quantum Community Manager at Xanadu, where she helps build the community around PennyLane. Today she’s working with professors from around the world, helping them include quantum programming in their courses. In the...
Weyl semimetals (WSMs) are materials whose low-energy excitations are Weyl fermions. Since its first observation in 2015, much work has gone into understanding the various properties of the WSM, most notably the Fermi arc -- a surface projection of the Berry flux connecting the WSM's zero-energy points. Here, we study the effects of tunnelling on the band structure and Fermi arc of a...
A remarkable diversity of morphologies exists among flagellated bacteria and, more broadly, motile microorganisms. To understand some of the consequences of these design choices, we numerically simulate the swimming motion of flagellated bacteria and model squirmers using a boundary element method. We show that interactions with solid surfaces bounding their fluid environment are particularly...
One of the exciting new frontiers in cosmology and structure formation is the Epoch of Reionization (EoR), a period when the radiation from the early stars and galaxies ionized almost all gas in the Universe. This epoch forms an important evolutionary link between the smooth matter distribution at early times and the highly complex structures seen today. Gaining insights into this epoch has...
Building on our accurate measurement of the $\beta$ direction's asymmetry with respect to decaying polarized $^{37}$K [B. Fenker PRL 120 062502], we plan further measurements of the momenta of the recoiling progeny nucleus in coincidence. $^{37}$K's decay to its isobaric analog state has similar sensitivity to unknown physics compared to neutron decay, while a nuclear structure feature where...
Burst-mode ultrafast laser-materials treatments use high-repetition-rate (>MHz) delivery of femtosecond laser pulses. This takes advantage of characteristically tiny residual heat left in a substrate through individual femtosecond-laser-matter interaction. At the same time, the approach opens the door to manipulating the accumulation of that same tiny heat from rapid repetition. This mode of...
Long-lived particles (LLPs) are well-motivated signatures that can appear in many models of physics beyond the Standard Model. The Detection ability of LLPs at current accelerator-based experiments is restricted, as they may decay outside of the tracking acceptance of these experiments, especially for LLPs with masses above GeV and lifetimes at the limit set by Big Bang Nucleosynthesis,...
Justin Furlotte is a Data Scientist with Fiddlehead Technology in Moncton, New Brunswick. His academic background included a BSc in Mathematics-Physics from the University of New Brunswick, followed by a MSc in Mathematics at the University of British Columbia, where he researched the quantum Hall effect and quantum lattice systems. Justin has also previously worked with a thermal analysis...
Several high profile quantum algorithms have failed in the last decade, meaning that a better classical algorithm has been found. This has been especially pronounced in the field of quantum machine learning. While some methods have known bounds and are definitely faster than classical algorithms, the practicalities of finding a good working quantum algorithm capable of effecting real change...
While photons are poised to play a key role for a wide range of quantum technologies, several experimental barriers still need to be overcome for most practical applications. In this talk, I will first present a brief overview of the advantages and drawbacks of using photons for quantum information, before discussing some important research directions currently being pursued in order to...
With a career path spanning over 20 years across several continents, I followed and adapted to the opportunities as they arose. Beginning from an applied physics base, I have worked in; defense, solved product heat treatment problems using 1st principles physics, destroyed products, destroyed plasma coating machines, then designed and built them, developed thin film coating material solutions...
Artificial intelligence plays an increasing role in many situations in our everyday lives. Its immense power finds applications in various fields, recently also including the field of quantum many-body physics. Artificial neural networks have led to improved numerical studies of qubit systems, increasing our understanding of these systems, which build the foundation of quantum computers and...
The material state of embryonic tissues emerges from the collective interactions of cells. Most tissues are soft active materials that can flow or deform. This deformability is shown to be important for proper embryonic development. However, cell and tissue mechanics are experimentally difficult to probe in developing animals. Here, I will discuss our research developing computational and...
Filamentary plasma structures aligned with magnetic fields are ubiquitous in various space and laboratory plasma environments. In numerous magnetic confinement devices, such coherent structures called blobs or blob-filaments, are intermittently formed in the boundary layer region of the device and transported across magnetic field lines through ExB convective motion. These structures can be...
Silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) technology displaced photomultiplier tubes in the design of next-generation experiments in particle physics. This presentation will focus on astroparticle physics experiments that will use liquid argon or liquid xenon with SiPM photo-detectors for rare-event searches such as dark matter, neutrinoless double beta decay, solar neutrinos, supernova neutrinos, and...
The nEXO experiment is a proposed next-generation liquid xenon detector to search for neutrino-less double beta decay (0νββ) of 136Xe. The experiment will use a 5-tonne liquid xenon monolithic single-phase time projection chamber enriched to 90% 136Xe. Ionization electrons and scintillation photons from energy deposits in the Xe will be recorded by a segmented anode place and a large SiPM...
The multimessenger binary neutron star merger GW170817 and subsequent LIGO-Virgo gravitational-wave discoveries are shedding new light on the ultra-dense matter inside neutron stars. With densities and pressures several times greater than those in atomic nuclei, neutron star cores harbour the most extreme matter in the Universe. Its composition remains an open question: does it consist...
Resource theories provide a unifying framework to characterize the usefulness of quantum objects with respect to specified tasks. In this talk I will present the main ideas, showing that such a framework is quite general, and seemingly different phenomena can be all described within it. I will also chart some promising directions for future developments in this area of quantum information.
Medical physicists are health care professionals with specialized training in the medical applications of physics. Their work often involves the use of x-rays, ultrasound, magnetic and electric fields, infra-red and ultraviolet light, heat and lasers in diagnosis and therapy. Medical physicists work in hospital diagnostic imaging departments, cancer treatment facilities, hospital-based...
While qubit is the basic unit in most quantum information devices and applications, there is another class of quantum system that offers infinite states per degree of freedom. Bosonic systems, in this respect, are everywhere and provide loads of practical advantages. In this short talk, I will introduce the basics and features of bosonic quantum technologies, and try to convince you that we...
The quantum computing stack is the sequence of transformations that must be performed for the high-level description of a quantum algorithm to be executed on a (concrete or hypothetical) quantum computer. In this talk I will discuss old and new developments in the field and comment on the role that the quantum stack can play in the advent of practical quantum computing.
Colloids are mesoscopic particles that enable a systematic study of inter-particle interactions in soft materials. The depletion interaction is an attractive effective interaction that can be tuned by polymer additives, while the amplitude and frequency of an external electric field can be used to tune the dipolar interaction. Using these two interactions simultaneously, we create...
Plasma flow and acceleration in the magnetic nozzle with converging-diverging magnetic configuration are important for applications in electric propulsion and fusion systems such as open mirrors and tokamak divertors. We report on some features of plasma acceleration in the magnetic nozzle that have been revealed in recent analytical and computational studies. The non-monotonic magnetic field...
Just over 65 years ago Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler, and Hoyle (B2FH) charted the initial roadmap for nuclear astrophysics. This seminal work recognized that explaining the origins of the heavy elements such as lead, gold, and uranium requires at least two types of neutron capture nucleosynthesis processes with each having distinct astrophysical sites. At the time of B2FH the rapid neutron...
The MoEDAL experiment deployed at IP8 on the LHC ring was the first dedicated search experiment to take data at the LHC in 2010. It was designed to search for Highly Ionizing Particle (HIP) avatars of new physics such as magnetic monopoles, dyons, Q-balls, multiply charged particles, massive slowly moving charged particles and long-lived massive charge SUSY particles. We shall report on our...
Probing electroweak physics at low energies plays an important role in the search for physics beyond the Standard Model. The exchange of Z bosons between an atom’s electrons and quarks induce an incredibly small atomic transition which can be probed via an atomic parity-violation (APV) experiment. APV measurements are sensitive as searches for leptoquarks and additional neutral gauge bosons...
Coherent scattering of photons in a dilute vapour of alkali atoms provides a strong link between the quantum information stored in the photonic and collective spin Hilbert spaces. In our lab we are looking at the mapping of photonic quantum states into and out of collective spins. By continuously scattering, we are creating highly correlated beams exhibiting EPR entanglement as well as...
Coherent scattering of photons in a dilute vapour of alkali atoms provides a strong link between the quantum information stored in the photonic and collective spin Hilbert spaces. In our lab we are looking at the mapping of photonic quantum states into and out of collective spins. By continuously scattering, we are creating highly correlated beams exhibiting EPR entanglement as well as...
The neutron lifetime from beta decay, τ , is a significant value for predictions in particle physics and cosmology. It is used to verify the unitarity of the Cabbibo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix, the weak force quark mixing matrix in the Standard Model, and for evaluating the abundances of light elements such as Helium-4, created during big bang nucleosynthesis. Furthermore, there is a 3.6 σ...
Over the last years, artificial neural networks have been explored as powerful and systematically tuneable ansatz to represent quantum wave functions. Such numerical models can tomographically reconstruct quantum states and operator expectation values from a finite amount of measurements. At the same time, artificial neural networks can find the ground state wave function of a given...
Bacteria are often assumed to allocate cellular resources to maximize their exponential growth rate. This postulate, derived from studies of Escherichia coli, is commonly interpreted as an economic principle, in which the cell balances supply of and demand for “metabolic currencies” such as amino acids during steady-state growth. However, testing these predictions has been a major experimental...
The ionosphere, an ionized part of the Earth’s atmosphere, affects radio waves passing through it. The ionosphere and structures in them can cause disruptions in communication, position, navigation, and timing (CPNT) systems that rely on radio signals. These effects are scale dependent and driven by plasma turbulence (irregularities) in the ionosphere. The impact of ionospheric plasma...
Neutron beta decay is a fundamental nuclear process that provides a means
to perform precision measurements that test the limits of our present under-
standing of the weak interaction described by the Standard Model of particle
physics and puts constraints on physics beyond the Standard Model. The Nab
experiment will measure ‘a’, the electron-neutrino angular correlation parameter,
to a...
After reviewing some key hints and puzzles from the early
universe, I will introduce recent joint work with Neil Turok
suggesting a rigid and predictive new approach to addressing them.
Our universe seems to be dominated by radiation at early times, and
positive vacuum energy at late times. Taking the symmetry and
analyticity properties of such a spacetime seriously leads to a...
Many physics research innovations have made their way to very successful commercial products that have transformed our day to day lives. In recent years more and more researchers are looking into the aspect of how their fundamental and/or applied research results can be commercialized. In this talk I will be presenting various phases related to the transition from research lab to industry,...
Pre-Recorded
Cosmological dark matter remains an important unsolved problem in physics. Direct detection using liquid argon offers exciting discovery potential to the “neutrino fog” with sensitivity to spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross sections below $10^{-48}\,\mbox{cm}^{2}$. A program of phased deployment of ever more sensitive detectors will be described, including the upgraded DEAP-3600 experiment...
Mike has a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of New Brunswick. His post-graduate work focussed primarily on molecular physics and included both a Masters degree from the University of New Brunswick and a PhD from the University of Waterloo. After graduation, Mike’s career diversified working first in astro-physics while doing a post-doctoral fellowship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion...
The University of Waterloo's graduate program in Quantum Information has been delivered as a collaboration between the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) and seven departments since 2010. We will discuss the structure and success of the program, as well as recent additions including three Masters'-level laboratory courses and parallel programs for undergraduate students.
Viewing neural quantum state tomography (NQST) as a flexible method for capturing classical snapshots of experimentally prepared quantum states opens doors to many applications of it in quantum simulation. In this talk we first review "Neural Error Mitigation" (Nat Mach Intell 4, 2022) for improving predictions of various observables obtained via quantum simulation of quantum states of...
In the past few years, the prospect of probing fundamental symmetries with radioactive molecules has generated significant interest in the field of low-energy, high-precision tests of the Standard Model of particle physics. Indeed, tailored molecules containing short-lived radioactive atoms are predicted to be especially sensitive to violations of fundamental symmetries such as a permanent...
Van Roosbroeck’s equations constitute a versatile tool to determine the dynamics of electrons under time- and space-dependent perturbations. Extensively utilized in ordinary semiconductors, their potential to model devices made from topological materials remains untapped. In this talk, we will adapt van Roosbroeck’s equations to theoretically study the bulk response of a Weyl semimetal to an...
Plasma Immersion Ion Implantation (PIII) is a powerful high-fluence ion implantation technique in which the target to be implanted is immersed in a plasma containing the desired ion species. PIII finds a wide variety of applications in semiconductor processing. A more recent area of application for our PIII technology is treatment of candidate materials for Plasma Facing Components (PFCs)...
The University of Calgary has formed a strategic partnership with the Government of Alberta, and Mphasis, an information technology company, to establish Quantum City. One of the main goals of the Quantum City initiative is to create new talent development programs, to attract talent, researchers, and students to Calgary. In this spirit, the University of Calgary has launched the first-ever...
In the Fall of 2019, the NEWS-G experiment used its latest detector, a 140 cm diameter Spherical Proportional Counter (SPC) to search for low-mass dark matter at the Laboratoire souterrain de Modane (LSM), in France. SPCs are metallic spheres filled with gas, with a high voltage anode at the centre that attracts and amplifies ionization charges coming from atomic recoils. Having the sphere...
Plasma Immersion Ion Implantation (PIII) consists in immersing in a plasma a negatively biased target (or electrode) with high voltage (HV) pulse in order to drive ions into the target and change the target surface structure and/or composition. This process has broad applications in the field of materials processing as well as semiconductor manufacturing. Improving PIII operational efficiency...
Perturbation experiments—where the response of a system of interest is observed after exposure to drugs or disruptions—are commonly used to identify interactions in biochemical reaction networks. However, it is often the case that the data is only analysed for its deterministic averages, and analysis techniques also rely on specific knowledge of each perturbation’s targets. We use constraints...
Low-energy precision electro-weak physics tests are advocated as part of the search for physics beyond the Standard Model. We are working towards a measurement of atomic parity violation (APV) in francium (Z = 87), the heaviest alkali, in a magneto-optical trap (MOT) online to ISAC at TRIUMF. The transition of interest in Fr is between the 7S and 8S states, where the parity violating (PV)...
Measurement of the charged-pion branching ratio to electrons versus muons, Re/μ, is extremely sensitive to a wide variety of new physics effects. The precision of the SM prediction for Re/μ is ~1 part in 10^4, 15 times more precise than the current experimental result. A next-generation experiment, PIONEER, is aiming at reducing the precision gap between theory and experiment, testing lepton...
A quantum computer attains computational advantage when outperforming the best classical computers running the best-known algorithms on well-defined tasks. We report quantum computational advantage using Borealis, a photonic processor offering dynamic programmability on all gates implemented. We carry out Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) on 216 squeezed modes entangled with three-dimensional...
In the past couple of years, machine learning has permeated many areas of physics and found numerous applications in condensed matter and chemistry. In particular, we have witnessed remarkable progress toward developing computational methods using neural networks as variational estimators. Variational representations of quantum states abound and have successfully been used to guess...
Plasma discharges contains two distinct zones having different physical properties, namely the quasi-neutral bulk plasma and the sheath where the quasi-neutrality does not hold, separated by an intermediate transition zone called pre-sheath [1]. In particular, the sheath has a strong impact on the entire gas discharge since it is where the plasma interacts with the boundaries. The...
This unique graduate scholarship training program is hosted by the QMI and co-delivered by faculty at three BC universities (SFU, UBC and UVic) in collaboration with Quantum Computing industry partners. It integrates quantum hardware and software courses, hands-on workshops, professional development and a paid industrial internship.
Drug resistance is a global health threat that is undermining the advances of modern medicine. Non-genetic forms of drug resistance have been established over the last two decades to play an important role in drug resistance. However, the interplay between non-genetic and genetic forms of drug resistance is largely unknown, as are the evolutionary dynamics in fluctuating drug conditions.
...
Chaired by Daniel Cluff
Patrick Reid, Moltex Clean Energy
Justin Furlotte, Fiddlehead Technology
Troy vom Braucke, GP Plasma
Jonathan Dysart, Horizon Health
Daniel Cluff, Deep Mining
Pandurang Ashrit, Universite de Moncton
Michael Dick, Green Imaging Technologies
Microwave plasmas are hugely-studied plasmas, they have characteristics that make them unique, they can be generated for low and high-pressures, they have relatively high densities of charged particles, and can be generated in different cavity geometries. It has been proven that pulsing a microwave discharge can be beneficial for multiple application. Indeed, power interruption reduces gas...
ALPHA-g has completed a successful run in 2022 in the pursuit of measuring the gravitational mass of antihydrogen. This apparatus was designed to test whether antimatter follows Einstein’s Weak Equivalence Principle (WEP), where the acceleration due to gravity that a body experiences is independent of its structure or composition. A measurement of the gravitational mass of antimatter has never...
Cancer incidence is on the rise in Canada, and metastasis is often associated with lowered life expectancy. Bone, especially the spine, is the common site of metastasis for breast, lung and prostate cancers. Treatments for these tumors rely on heavy doses of chemotherapeutic agents and invasive surgical procedures, which usually extend onto healthy tissue. This difficult procedure often...
Ultracold neutrons (UCNs) are a powerful tool for probing fundamental physics, enabling precision measurements in a variety of research areas, such as beta decay, electric dipole moments, and gravitational quantum states. To advance these experimental efforts it is necessary to develop new, high-density UCN sources capable of providing order-of-magnitude improvements in statistical...
Tissue material properties can change drastically during embryonic development, reminiscent of rigidity transitions in physics. However, measuring the transitions or learning how to control the transitions is challenging experimentally. Theoretical and computational models provide new powerful tools to offer hypotheses on how to control the transitions. In this talk, I will introduce...
An update of the R&D associated with upgrading the SuperKEKB e+e− collider with polarized electron beams is presented. The Chiral Belle physics program enables a set of unique precision measurements using the Belle II detector. It includes a set of measurements of $\sin^2\theta_W$ via separate left-right asymmetry ($A_{LR}$) measurements in $e^+e^−$ annihilations to pairs of electrons, muons,...
Motivated by fundamental symmetry tests, a non-zero measurement of a permanent electric dipole moment (EDM) would represent a clear signal of the violation of the CP symmetries. The imbalance in the matter and antimatter observed in our Universe is believed to arise from such violations, although the amount that is present in the Standard Model (SM) is insufficient. Many extensions to the SM...
In this presentation, we will discuss the continuation of our construction of our Gee-Whiz experiments. These experiments focus specifically on techniques in ultrafast laser physics. We have been developing an experiment in frequency doubling and autocorrelation, both of which make use of an ultrafast laser. The experiment is especially noteworthy at Waterloo because it is part of a new...
The physics of strongly interacting fermionic systems is an interesting topic in nuclear physics. The Hubbard model is one of the simplest yet insightful models that we use to study the strongly interacting fermions. We perform benchmark calculations of ground state energies for the repulsive and attractive Hubbard model using the Auxilary Field Quantum Monte Carlo method, and further tune the...
The Light-only Liquid Xenon (LoLX) experiment is designed to study the properties of light emission and transport in liquid xenon (LXe) using silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs). A particular focus of LoLX is to measure and study Cherenkov and scintillation light emission in LXe. LoLX is currently being upgraded to investigate the long-term behaviour and performance of Hamamatsu VUV4 and FBK...
We present progress towards an ultra-low phase noise microwave synthesizer, critical for achieving high-precision quantum gravimeters and gyroscopes based on cold-atom interferometry. The microwave synthesizer is used both for laser cooling ⁸⁷Rb atoms and inducing ground-state Raman transitions that function as momentum-transfer pulses in our atom interferometer. During these pulses, the phase...
Abstract:
The main goal of this research is to obtain a clear and accurate model of the late-time behavior of a quantum-corrected black hole’s radiative emission wave. Specifically, the focus is on late-time tail waveforms, which appear after the exponentially damped signal originating from the ring down phase of a perturbed black hole. This project focused on interpreting the effects of...
Introduction
The use of laser-polarized Xenon-129 exponential ($^{129}$Xe) as a novel contrast agent for MRI has been shown to be effective for functional (1,2) and structural imaging the brain (3) and other organs(4). It was approved by the FDA in December 2022. $^{129}$Xe-based imaging could transform our methods of mapping grey and white matter,(5) perfusion,(3) by...
We investigate the transport properties of charge carrier disordered organic
semiconductors with a focus on the determination and analysis of charge carrier
mobility. By understanding that charge transport is due to incoherent hopping of
charge carriers across localized states, we use a model that relates mobility to charge
carrier (not small polarons) hopping by thermal activation. We...
The presumption of magic numbers and nuclear shell closures is a fundamental paradigm of our understanding of atomic nuclei. However, far away from the valley of stability, expected properties within these well-established shell closures can significantly differ. A prime example for this so-called shell evolution is the island of inversion around neutron-rich magnesium and sodium isotopes...
Using quantum field theory, we calculate the total effect on the photon flux in the microwave background due to some photons being gravitationally scattered toward us and others being gravitationally scattered away from us. The scattering is produced by the density fluctuations which act like point masses in a FLRW background, which can be of either sign. The net effect of having masses of...
This study focused on investigating whether ball milling and cold rolling can improve the hydrogen absorption and desorption kinetics of magnesium hydride (MgH2) and reduce its process temperature. Despite having a high hydrogen storage capacity, good reversibility, and low cost, MgH2 has not been widely used due to its high temperature of operation and slow rate of hydrogen absorption and...
We demonstrate a method for stabilizing a diode laser using a frequency-offset locking scheme and commercial electronics. Our 1560 nm diode laser is slaved to an ultra-stable master laser operating at 780 nm by frequency-doubling the slave laser and measuring its optical beatnote with the master on a high-speed photodiode. This RF beatnote is fed through a broadband variable divider and a...
Complex plasmas are made of micrometer-sized particles immersed in a weakly ionized gas. Due to their interactions with the surrounding ions and electrons, the microparticles usually acquire negative charges of the order of several thousand elementary charges. Due to microparticles interactions, complex plasmas can form gaseous, liquid and crystalline states. For this reason, they are often...
Screening for breast cancer and disease is a routine and common practice among woman. Early detection of cancerous tumours has been shown to greatly reduce mortality. Commonly screening is performed using two-dimensional ultrasound, or mammographic imaging. A smaller dense breast is difficult to image on a mammogram system, and is more likely to be ultrasonically probed. Moreover, standard 2D...
In September 2015, UN member states adopted the Sustainable Development Program known as Agenda 2030. This program defines targets to be reached by 2030 to meet the challenges of the current and future environmental crisis.
The UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a reference framework for operationalizing sustainable development, including adaptation to climate change, improving...
Bell's inequalities provide a practical method for testing whether correlations observed between spatially separated parts of a system are compatible with any local hidden variable description. For $2-$ qubit pure states, entanglement and nonlocality as measured by Bell inequality violations are directly related. However, for multiqubit pure states, the much more complex relation between...
Reliable measurements of plasma parameters are a good way to confirm if the plasma dynamics fit well with our theoretical models as well as giving insight into the plasma's state. The ion temperature in the plasma cannot be measured from a typical Langmuir probe which makes it hard to estimate. To do so, it is possible to use a Ball-Pen probe (BPP) which has the ability to partially shield...
In electron-doped Strontium Titanate (SrTiO3), ferroelectricity can coexist simultaneously with metallicity. Absent any electrons, the ferroelectric domains will orient themselves into the so-called “Kittel Domains” in order to minimize their free energy. The impact of free electrons on their behaviour remains under active investigation with research suggesting that electron density plays a...
Multi-frequency Raman generation (MRG) is a high order stimulated Raman process that can produce ultrashort laser pulses with high intensities. In experimental realizations of MRG, phenomena arise such as a single sideband shifted to a lower frequency on each of the Raman order peaks. These phenomena are not explained by previous theory. We derive analytic expressions for properties of MRG,...
The study of muons is very important as they are at the center of several current discrepancies between the experiments and the theoretical predictions, such as the measurement of anomalous magnetic moment and rare decays of B-meson that involve muons. The best limits set in the charged lepton flavour violation are by the muon sector experiments. This is the time to focus on the experiments...
The purpose of this poster is to show and discuss aspects of the construction and calibration of a new optical tweezers as well as an FCS setup. Optical tweezers use electromagnetic gradient forces together with radiation pressure to trap microscopic particles within a focused laser beam, and move them as required, making the tool suitable for applications in biological physics at microscopic...
NV centers in a diamond crystal consist of a substitutional nitrogen atom next to a lattice vacancy. These commonly appear in two distinct charge states, the neutral NV center (NV${^o}$) and the negatively charged NV center (NV${^-}$). While the more commonly formed state is the NV${^o}$ , the NV${^-}$ center has S = 1 fine structure that has important magnetic field dependent fluorescence...
Our goal is to develop a nano-biosensor using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) to analyze and measure hemoglobin (Hb) levels, even at low concentrations, with good accuracy and reproducibility. This will facilitate fast and real-time differentiation of Hb disorders, such as sickle cell anemia, without using any labels or fluorophores.
To enhance the sensitivity of the Raman...
We present the results of an extensive study of the phase diagram and spin wave excitations for a general spin model on a hexagonal AB-stacked kagome lattice. Depending on the strength of the spin-orbit coupling (SOC), some spin and lattice rotations may become decoupled, leading to considerably larger symmetry groups than typical magnetic groups. Thus, we provide a detailed symmetry...
Dark matter annihilation(DMA) provide an promising avenue to detect dark matter particles. Meanwhile, 21-cm line of hydrogen during cosmic dawn have great potential to reveal the information about the early galaxies and stellar formation process.
In this presentation, we elucidate the study using semi-analytic method to model the dark matter annihilation from global background and structure...
The TRIUMF polarizer facility provides nuclear-spin-polarized radioactive isotopes via collinear optical pumping for physical and biomedical science$^{[1]}$. Recently, more exotic isotopes, such as $^{32}$Na and $^{230,232}$Ac, with production rates below ~1000 s$^{-1}$, are demanded to be highly spin-polarized to study nuclear structure and develop radiopharmaceuticals for cancer treatment....
Originally the subject of Star Wars science-fiction, astronomers have discovered planets orbiting twin suns, just like on the fictional planet Tatooine appearing in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. More commonly known as circumbinary planets, these systems are ones in which the planet is in orbit around both binary stars. In these gaseous bodies, tidal forces induce interior gaseous mixing of...
It is known that Schwarzchild geometry exhibits thermodynamic properties and these have a statistical mechanics explanation. An interesting question to ask is if we can study the statistical mechanics of spins on this background. In this presentation we will answer this question in the positive and construct an Ising-like model on black hole space. Then we will numerically study the...
Nonlinear laser fiber amplification is a powerful technique known for generating high-energy, ultrashort pulses efficiently and compactly, finding applications in various fields. In this study, our objective is to develop and optimize a two-color nonlinear amplification system, which will serve as a crucial component for future multi-frequency Raman generation (MRG) experiments. The...
The NEWS-G experiment is a dark matter experiment based on gaseous detectors, located at SNO lab. The experiment aims to detect WIMPs by measuring nuclear recoils in noble gases using a spherical proportional counter (SPC) detector, which offers high sensitivity due to its unprecedented low energy threshold. Accurate measurement of the recoil energy requires knowledge of the quenching factor...
We present our progress towards developing a trapped ion quantum information processor and describe our robust hardware and software architecture. Our platform for storing and processing quantum information is trapped Barium ions. Because of long-lived ground and metastable atomic states and transitions in the visible wavelengths, Ba$^+$ offers exciting possibilities to encode quantum...
NEWS-G is an experiment searching for dark matter using the Spherical Proportional Counter (SPC) technique. Such detectors can operate significant mass of target, of order of kgs with meter size spheres, while keeping single ionization electron detection sensitivity. They can be filled with gaseous targets of low atomic mass such as hydrogen, helium, and neon, giving sensitivity to low mass...
Solar-like stars oscillate as a result of sound and gravity waves that propagate through the sphere; the waves allow us to then probe the stellar interior for information on its physical properties. These stars will evolve off the main sequence to the red giant branch (RBG) and subsequently either to the red clump or secondary red clump stages depending on their mass. Additionally, some...
We synthesized a green-fluorescent conjugated polymer (CP) referred to as “Atums Green”. This organic-soluble polymer had a molecular weight up to 50 kDa and featured a strong green fluorescence both in solution and in the solid state. Photophysical studies were done to explore its application in laser photonics in the green band. The PL emission has an absolute quantum efficiency as high as...
This report presents a review of the Touschek lifetime in fourth-generation accelerator machines. Specifically, the report focuses on the Møller scattering differential cross section and the loss rate of electrons within a bunch of electrons defined by longitudinal potential wells.
When electrons in a bunch move towards each other, they can interact and scatter away due to Møller scattering....
The aim of this research project is to evaluate the functionality of our instruments for performing non-linear elastic measurements and establish best practices for transient-wave dynamic acousto-elastic testing (TW-DAET). TW-DAET employs a pump and probe configuration. We perturb a sample with a low-frequency pulse (50 kHz pump), then probe the system with a high-frequency pulse (300-1000 kHz...
When a Brownian particle moves too rapidly for the medium to effectively absorb its kinetic energy, the standard Einstein theory of diffusion with a constant viscous friction becomes invalidated. A natural description of this kind of Brownian dynamics is to take the friction as a decreasing even function of the particle's velocity. The stochastic equation of motion is formulated within this...
Quantum dots (QDs) are solids confined at the nanoscale in all directions, which often enables them to exhibit photoluminescence (PL) even if their long-range crystalline counterparts do not. QD-PL is essential to explain the different roles of confinement in these nano-objects. To gain insight into the luminescence of individual QDs, optical probes potentially capable of resolving the...
London dispersion is a weak, attractive, intermolecular force that occurs due to interactions between instantaneous dipole moments. While individual dispersion contributions are small, they are the dominating attractive force between non-polar species and determine many properties of interest. Standard methods in density-functional theory do not account for dispersion contributions, so a...
De nombreuses technologies d'ultra-haute précisions sont limitées par un phénomène fondamental : les fluctuations associées à la dissipation mécanique dans les matériaux amorphes. Ceux-ci sont présents dans les couches isolantes des dispositifs supraconducteurs et dans les miroirs diélectriques des cavités optiques quantiques, d’horloges atomiques, et des détecteurs d’ondes gravitationnelles....
The fourth-generation synchrotron radiation light source has the outstanding advantages such as low divergence and high brightness, facilitating high spatial and energy resolution X-ray spectroscopy studies and the detection of “light-in-light-out” photon-hungry spectroscopy. The proposed high-resolution soft X-ray spectroscopy beamlines of Shenzhen Industrial Light Source (SILF) will...
The unique structure of two-dimensional (2D) Dirac crystals, with electronic bands linear in the proximity of the Brillouin-zone boundary and the Fermi energy, creates anomalous situations where small Fermi-energy perturbations critically affect the electron-related lattice properties of these systems.[1] We have studied the interaction of these electrons with acoustic phonons, where the...
In 2019, we, as a group of scholars and community members working in fields as different as Physics, First Peoples Studies, Science Education, Decolonizing Curriculum and Pedagogy, Environmental Science, and Science and Technology Studies, came together to explore ways of decolonizing physics. Funded by the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF), we decided to exemplarily focus on light (rather...
The start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the first waves of lockdowns coincided with some big changes in how we approach learning on campus. Teleconferencing used to mean an awkward and clumsy Skype call, but now zoom meetings, zoom tutorials and zoom office hours are commonplace. Accommodations for at-home learning and assessments are sometimes expected. Online assessments are notoriously...
The Super-Kamiokande (SuperK) and Hyper-Kamiokande (HyperK) water Cherenkov detectors for particle and astroparticles consist of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) that detect Cherenkov light surrounding a large ultra-pure water tank (40m and 70m diameter, respectively).
Water quality is critical because it ensures good water transparency and, as a result, a long Cherenkov light attenuation length...
The Belle II experiment at the SuperKEKB asymmetric $e^+e^-$ collider in Japan is a state-of-the-art upgrade to the original Belle experiment and is searching for new physics at the Intensity Frontier. Since commencing physics data taking in 2019, SuperKEKB has become the world’s highest luminosity particle collider as Belle II approaches its target integrated luminosity of 50 ab$^{-1}$, which...
Bosonic quantum systems, such as photons, mechanical oscillators and spin ensembles, are promising platforms for implementing quantum technologies. Operating these quantum devices inevitably require interfaces that couple multiple bosonic degrees of freedom (modes). Unfortunately, each platform suffers from respective practical restrictions that limit the type of interface being implemented....
The general computation of dynamic properties of materials remains a longstanding, difficult problem within computational physics. Surprisingly, simple models such as the homogeneous electron gas (jellium) play critical roles in application of Density Functional Theory and its time-dependent extensions. Those calculations are impeded by the difficulty of evaluating Feynman diagrams on the...
Silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) detectors operated in Geiger mode are recently enabling a wide variety of biophotonics applications due to several advantageous features over traditional photomultiplier tubes. Silicon photomultiplier technology combines highly sensitive photon counting with miniaturized packaging, providing portability, low voltage operation, immunity to magnetic field...
To further advance the understanding of key reaction mechanism and paths in stellar nucleosynthesis and probe nuclear structure, experiments with radioactive isotopes in inverse kinematics are a vital tool to get direct information on reaction cross sections and rates. Unfortunately, the low intensities of radioactive isotope beams in relation to stable beams in combination with the extremely...
Sprays are dynamic collections of droplets dispersed in a gas. They are used in many industrial and agricultural applications such as manufacturing processes, fuel injection, painting, and crop protection. Furthermore, ‘‘Sprays are among the most intellectually
challenging and practically important topics in fluid mechanics” (Fansler, Parrish, 2014), requiring quantitative measurements for...
Surveys of physics department chairs show that one of the most common threats faced by departments in 2022 were low student enrollments, sometimes putting the whole department in threat of closure. The EP3 Guide (ep3guide.org) provides a set of practices and strategies to help with both the recruitment and the retention of students. In this workshop, we will discuss a scenario from a fictional...
Our lab recently introduced a methodology to determine the average velocity and flow behaviour index of laminar pipe flow using simple magnetic resonance techniques. The knowledge of these two parameters provides the information needed to reconstruct the flow velocity profile. However, as the flow velocity increases, the flow will begin to develop turbulence. For a given fluid moving through...
Silicon PhotoMultipliers (SiPMs) have been adopted in many applications due to their ability to reliably detect single photons with excellent timing resolution. These applications range from detecting scintillation photons in large area particle physics experiments, to light detection for LiDAR or other industry uses. Due to the large internal gain of these devices ($\sim10^6$), a large number...
Low-field portable magnetic resonance has several advantages over conventional high-field scanners, in that they are low cost, simple to construct, and readily employed outside a dedicated research lab. Numerous magnet designs have been created in recent decades which have been used for material characterization to improve industrial processes, and medical procedures. Portable magnet designs...
Neutron rich Mg isotopes far from stability belong to a region known as the island of inversion where the single particle description of the shell model breaks down, and the predicted configuration of the nuclear states becomes inverted. Nuclei in this region also exhibit collective behaviour in which multiple particle interactions play a significant role in nuclear matrix elements. These...
We develop an approach for the characterization of universal qutrit gates which extends Clifford Randomized Benchmarking (RB). Our extension uses group theoretical and data recovery methods similar to RB. We show that our approach is both feasible and efficient, and compatible with current experimental methods. This extended RB scheme is valuable for three communities. For experimentalists, it...
Belle-II is a B-factory experiment on the luminosity frontier. The high luminosity leads to high backgrounds, specifically in the electro-magnetic calorimeter (ECL). The ECL is a subdetector made from CsI scintillators, mostly serving to detect photons and measure their energy. One background comes in the form of hadronic split offs which mimic low energy photons. These occur when a hadron...
MUTE (MUon inTensity codE) is a Python program (https://github.com/wjwoodley/mute) that combines two state-of-the-art codes, MCEq and PROPOSAL, to calculate muon intensities and spectra in deep underground and underwater laboratories. We have previously shown that, using these tools, MUTE can provide forward predictions while accurately characterising the uncertainties arising from hadron...
Inadequate oxygen delivery to the brain is a major cause of cerebral injury. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a portable and non-invasive technique that can detect brain injury by monitoring cerebral oxygenation. However, the use of NIRS for adult neuromonitoring has been stymied by significant signal contamination from their thick (~10mm) extracerebral layers (ECL; scalp and skull)....
Experiments in doped transition metal oxides often show suppression in the single-particle density of states at the Fermi level, but disorder-induced zero-bias anomalies in strongly-correlated systems remain poorly understood. Numerical studies of the Anderson-Hubbard model have identified a zero-bias anomaly that is unique to strongly correlated materials, with a width proportional to the...
A polarized electron beam is being considered as an upgrade for the SuperKEKB accelerator, which would enable a new precision electroweak physics program at Belle II. For many of the proposed measurements the dominant systematic uncertainty is expected to be the precision with which the average beam polarization is known. A novel technique for measuring beam polarization in $e^+e^-$...
Introduction:
Magnetic resonance imaging of short signal-lifetime samples comes with several challenges1, namely lower signal and the need for short acquisition windows. The apparent transverse relaxation time ($T_2^*$) of water-content in cement paste has been measured2 to be <0.3ms at 3T: this suggests imaging at low field (<0.5T) where $T_2^*$ is expected to be...
In this talk I will present updated results regarding the application of machine learning techniques for noise removal and physics-variable prediction on signals from spherical proportional counters (SPCs) with the NEWS-G experiment. In SPC detectors, a primary ionization, created by a particle interacting with the gas, drifts towards a central anode. When ions approach the anode, the electric...
Potassium-40 ($^{40}$K) is a naturally occurring, radioactive isotope impacting understanding of nuclear structure, geological ages spanning timescales as old as the Earth, and rare-event searches including those for dark matter and neutrinoless double-beta decay. The long-lived $^{40}$K radionuclide undergoes electron capture decays to either the excited or ground state of its Ar daughter, of...
The experimental discovery of graphene has largely relied on making it visible by optical microscopes when deposited on silicon wafers coated by a 300-nm SiO2 layer, leading to constructive optical interference in the visible photon energy range [1]. While such a discovery has enabled exciting new areas of research, so many of them do not use graphene on 300-nm SiO2/Si. Thus, methods to image...
We consider two approaches when calculating the properties of a ferroelectric system with charged
domain walls. These properties include domain wall width, electronic band structure and occupancy,
and the electronic potential energy. Previously, a single parameter, Q, was argued to determine the
crossover of the electron gas from quantum to quasi-classical. However, to obtain this result,...
Quantum-classical correspondence plays an important role in understanding the emergence of classical chaos from an underlying quantum mechanics. Here we present several families of quantum dynamics, each parameterized by dimension, that do not approach the classically chaotic dynamics as predicted by Bohr’s correspondence principle. The quantum dynamics take the form of stroboscopic unitary...
The New Small Wheel (NSW) is the largest major upgrade of the ATLAS Muon Spectrometer and was installed during the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Long Shutdown 2 (2019-2021). The NSW replaced both of the 9-metre-diameter ‘small’ wheels constituting the part of the Muon Spectrometer closest to the beam line. The NSW is composed of two technologies: MicroMegas and small-Strip Thin Gap Chambers...
Motivated by quantum gravity, semiclassical theory, and quantum theory on curved spacetimes, we study the system of an oscillator coupled to two spin-1/2 particles. This model provides a prototype for comparing three types of dynamics: the full quantum theory, the classical oscillator with spin backreaction, and spins propagating on a fixed oscillator background. From calculations of...
Nuclei away from the line of stability have been found to demonstrate behavior that is inconsistent with the traditional magic numbers of the spherical shell model. This has led to the concept of the evolution of nuclear shell structure in exotic nuclei, and the neutron-rich calcium isotopes are a key testing ground of these theories; there have been conflicting results from various...
We study the effects of dark matter self-interactions on the local dark matter distribution in selected Milky Way-like galaxies in the EAGLE hydrodynamical simulations. The simulations were run with two different self-interacting dark matter models, a constant and velocity-dependent self-interaction cross-section. We find that the local dark matter velocity distribution of the Milky Way-like...
The rigid rotor is a classic problem in quantum mechanics, describing the dynamics of a rigid body with its centre of mass held fixed. It can be viewed as the quantum mechanics of a particle moving in SO(3), the space of all rotations in three dimensions. The particle can move along two types of closed loops: trivial loops that can be adiabatically shrunk to a point and non-trivial loops that...
An exploratory multinuclear MR and MRI study was performed on lithium-ion battery cells with $^7$Li, $^{19}$F, and $^1$H measurements. A variable field superconducting magnet with a fixed frequency parallel-plate RF probe was employed in the study. The magnet's magnetic field was changed to set the resonance frequency of each nucleus to the fixed RF probe frequency of 33.7 MHz. Two...
The analysis of human nail clippings to determine the concentration of certain elements is often used to assess exposure to elements and their absorption into the body. When nail clippings are used as a biomarker, they are usually analyzed by a “gold standard” method such as inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Our group has investigated the use of a novel portable X-ray...
A ubiquitous goal of nuclear physics, within the context of nuclear structure, is to provide an informed characterization of the behaviour of collectivity throughout the chart of nuclides. This initiative continues to present as extraordinarily non-trivial, especially when considering regions of heavy nuclei, as such nuclei are highly unique many-body systems with a complex array of...
Reservoir rocks which trap oil and gas have been extensively studied for decades, due to their importance in the petroleum industry. Pore size is an important petrophysical property controlling fluid storage and fluid transport in reservoir rocks. Many techniques such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray, and mercury injection capillary porosimetry (MICP), have been applied to estimate...
A search for a beyond the Standard Model charged Higgs boson through $W\gamma$ resonances is presented, with a focus on the leptonic channel. The final state consists of either an electron or muon accompanied by at least one photon and less than two jets alongside a veto of b-jets is required. The analysis is based on the 139 $fb^{−1}$ of the proton-proton collision data at the centre-of-mass...
The NEWS-G experiment at SNOLAB uses spherical proportional counters, or SPCs, to detect weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which are a prime candidate for dark matter. Interactions within the gas-filled sphere create a primary ionization. Then, a radial electric field acting throughout the detector volume collects the electrons towards an anode sensor located at the sphere’s...
Join panelists at this lunchtime panel discussion to learn about initiatives being undertaken in Physics departments and Faculties of Science across the country to advance Equity in STEM. These panelists will bring a multidisciplinary perspective across STEM fields, with a student lens and a leadership frame of reference to provide the audience with concrete actions that have led to enhanced...
Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a real-time spectrochemical technique that involves performing time-dependent optical emission spectroscopy on high-temperature laser-induced microplasmas. The use of a focused laser beam allows one to make sensitive assays of the elemental composition of specimens while requiring only micrograms of analyte mass. Numerous medical and biomedical...
Experiments currently searching for dark matter, studying properties of neutrinos require very low levels of radioactive backgrounds both in their own construction materials and in the surrounding environment. These low background levels are required so that the current and next generation experiments can achieve the required sensitivities for their searches. SNOLAB has several facilities...
Lanczos-based algorithms have been demonstrated to play a pivotal role in quantum computing and classical methods. I review the development of these methods for a variety of physical systems and new implementations. I also review new use cases of these algorithms.
Ever since the first measurements were made of these ghostly particles, neutrinos have been a constant fascination for physicists due to their unusual properties. One such peculiarity is that neutrinos can seemingly change flavours as they propagate — a phenomenon known as neutrino oscillation. The oscillation probabilities are determined by a set of fundamental parameters in the Standard...
Constraining the properties of nuclear media at extreme densities has been a long-time goal of relativistic heavy-ion collision experiments. Mounting evidence gathered from these experiments suggests that a strongly interacting plasma of quarks and gluons – the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) – is being created within these collisions. The QGP can be well described using multi-stage simulations where...
There is a 10$\sigma$ discrepancy between theory and experiment for the ionization energy of the $1s2s^3S_1$ state of helium [1]. In order to provide an additional check, Clausen et al. [2] have performed measurements for the Rydberg $P$-states of helium from $n = 24$ to $n = 100$ and extrapolated to $n = \infty$ to find the ionization energy. In the present work, we extend previous...
Post-secondary science courses, including physics, have a role to play in supporting equity and inclusion in STEM. The extent to which our courses have equitable outcomes influences which doors are open or closed, and to whom, and ultimately determines if we can address the need for diverse teams of skilled scientists and citizens to devise and implement effective solutions. The Canadian...
The Abraham-Minkowski “controversy” is a debate in physics which began over a century ago, stemming from an ambiguity in defining the momentum of light within a medium. Simple physical arguments lead to a prediction that the momentum of light should either increase or decrease by a factor of the refractive index (compared to its value in the vacuum) upon entering a medium. Experimental...
The Innovation, Diversity, Exploration, and Advancement in STEM (IDEAS) Initiative is a national EDI-focused outreach program run out of Queen’s University. IDEAS utilizes a multi-generational approach to outreach, aiming to coordinate historically under-represented individuals within STEM in fostering an interest towards the natural sciences in Canadian youths. The IDEAS Initiative has run an...
While tremendous progress has been made, women and other gender minorities remain largely underrepresented in the Canadian physics community, a problem which first manifests at the high school level. All efforts to narrow the gender gap at the undergraduate level and beyond will continue to be hampered by the lack of gender diversity in students with the necessary prerequisites for a physics...
London dispersion is a weak, attractive, intermolecular force that occurs due to interactions between instantaneous dipole moments. While individual dispersion contributions are small, they are the dominating attractive force between non-polar species and determine many properties of interest. Standard methods in density-functional theory do not account for dispersion contributions, so a...
Purpose: In the context of previous analysis of dynamic nuclear medicine acquisitions, a
lack in available software was noticed: commercial systems are too opaque and do not
allow a sufficiently flexible use. To tackle this challenge, home-made scripts were
devised, which were then packaged for wider use. The goal is two-fold: dissolve
difficulties specific to dynamic nuclear medicine...
STrings for Absorption Length in Water (STRAW) is a pathfinder mission
for the proposed Pacific-Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE). STRAW
was deployed in 2018 with the goal of measuring the attenuation length of
the water. The results of these measurements were published in 2021 and
qualify the site for a large scale neutrino detector. STRAW is located in the
Cascadia Basin, an area off...
The two definitions of coherence: quantum and classical, are equivalent under the condition of stationarity and both remain useful for different experimental scenarios. However, as in many scenarios, the boundaries and connections between quantum and classical become unclear without common assumptions. One such scenario is an ultrashort laser pulse. Classical coherence is almost always defined...
We discuss how a condensate of non-abelian gauge fields is impacted with gravitational interactions in the early universe. The aim is to provide for new observational physics in the current cosmological background, as relics of early universe phenomena.
Many particle and rare-event search detectors use liquid scintillators as the active detector material. Candidate scintillating fluids include liquid noble elements such as Liquid Argon (LAr) and Liquid Xenon (LXe). Detectors that make use of scintillators hold the fluid inside an acrylic vessel, which can be coated with various films. One common coating is 1,1,4,-tetraphenyl-1,3-butadiene...
We present a theoretical model of Electromagnetically Induced Transparency in an ensemble of three-level atoms that are driven by a probe and a control field in a lambda configuration. The ensemble is modelled by a 5-level quantum system with the mean-field interactions between atoms modelled by decoherence terms. The dynamics of the ensemble are calculated by solving the Lindblad Master...
The precision measurements of neutrino oscillation parameters and neutrino-nucleus scattering and also unprecedented sensitivity to physics beyond the Standard Model are the goals of the Hyper-K experiment, a next generation long-baseline neutrino experiment. To be able to achieve these high precision and sensitivity these experiments need a reduction on the uncertainties in neutrino fluxes...
Our group is developing a plastic fiber optic probe dosimeter based on a radiochromic sensor for real-time in vivo dosimetry. The active component of the probe material is a lithium pentacosa -10, 12-diynoate (LiPCDA) coating on the order of microns in thickness. In radiochromic optical dosimeters both sensitivity and active material thickness variations in manufacturing can lead to...
nEXO is a next-generation neutrinoless double-beta decay experiment that is searching for this decay in 5-tonnes of liquid xenon (LXe) enriched in the isotope 136Xe. Silicon-photomultipliers have been selected to measure the vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) scintillation light from interactions within the LXe. Although candidate SiPMs from Hamamatsu (HPK) and FBK have been characterised within the...
Since the derivation of a well-defined D → 4 limit for 4D Gauss-Bonnet (4DGB) gravity coupled to a scalar field, there has been interest in testing it as an alternative to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Using the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff (TOV) equations modified for 4DGB gravity, we model the stellar structure of quark stars (QS) using a novel interacting quark matter equation of...
Because physics is one of few STEM fields that has yet to successfully address its gender and diversity gaps, there is work to be done to encourage different types of people to pursue physics as a degree. Part of the responsibility for this work rests with undergraduate physics professors and teaching staff, whose influence on students is profound. One question that has not been adequately...
We consider a one-dimensional flowing Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). We numerically model the mean-field wave function of this system, and compare our results to an analytical solution derived using the hydrodynamic approximation. We find that a sonic event horizon forms in the BEC, where in one region the flow of the condensate exceeds the speed of sound in the BEC, while across a boundary...
Liquid xenon (LXe) is frequently employed to build detectors for rare event searches due to many of its advantageous properties including high stopping power, high ionization and scintillation yields, and relatively high cryogenic operating temperature. Time projection chambers (TPC) with LXe allow for 3D event reconstruction and identification which is important for reducing backgrounds. Due...
Antineutrino scattering on free protons (or neutrino scattering off free neutrons) gives a unique measurement of neutron and proton structure and is a building block for predicting neutrino scattering on more complex nuclei. Previous measurements have to rely on scattering neutrinos off deuterium and then correcting for nuclear effects, or by low-intensity anti-neutrino beams. In this talk,...
We investigate the mutual information harvesting protocol for two uniformly accelerated particle detectors. We numerically show that, while a single detector responds as if it is immersed in a thermal bath, the quantum mutual information between two accelerating detectors behaves differently than that of two inertial detectors in a thermal bath. This is due to the fact that while the Wightman...
The discovery of non-thermal behaviour in a thermalizing quantum many-body system [Nature 551, 579-584 (2017)] led to the introduction of quantum many-body scars (QMBS). They are atypical eigenstates of chaotic systems and generally exhibit sub-volume or area law entanglement as opposed to the volume law present in the bulk of the eigenstates. The term, QMBS, was given using heuristic...
We are well aware that every human can be identified by their unique fingerprint. Taking inspiration from natures’ this wonder, there is an exclusive feature to identify different molecules/chemicals in materials science. We can find this attribute in the way molecules vibrate. Different molecules have different vibrational modes depending on their chemical constituents, bonding strength,...
The hyperfine structures of the $2^3S_1$ and $2^3P_J$ states of $^7$Be$^{2+}$ and $^9$Be$^{2+}$ are investigated within the framework of the nonrelativistic quantum electrodynamics, including relativistic and radiative corrections up to order $m\alpha^6$. The uncertainties of the calculated hyperfine splittings are on the order of tens of ppm, and for $^9$Be$^{2+}$ our results improve the...
Low-latency detection of Binary Black Hole (BBH) and Binary Neutron Star (BNS) merger Gravitational Wave (GW) signals is essential for enabling multi-messenger observations of such systems. The merger GW signals have changing frequencies and are contaminated by non-stationary noises. Earlier studies of non-templated merger signal detection techniques used traditional Fourier transform-based...
Ionization chambers are widely used for detecting radiation emitted as a result of nuclear decay, and offer potential for high-resolution energy measurement, particle track reconstruction, and for long-lived isotope lifetime measurements. Presently, they are commonly used for measuring the energy of alpha particles emitted during radioactive decay processes and are also used for fission...
The Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) long-baseline neutrino experiment measures neutrino-flavor oscillation parameters using the three-flavor oscillation model parameterized by the PMNS matrix. The measurement is performed by sampling the JPARC (anti)neutrino beam by various detectors at a near detector complex before oscillations and at a far detector after oscillations. A critical part of the data...
This analysis will make a measurement of the inclusive charged current anti-neutrino cross section on hydrocarbon as a function of muon kinematics. This measurement is being made with an unprecedented 1.8 million data events which have been recorded in the MINERvA detector [1]. The goal of the MINERvA experiment is to make high precision cross section measurements on various nuclei. There were...
I'll discuss the motivations for sub-GeV dark matter scenarios, and review progress over the past decade in accelerator-based searches.
Inelastic light scattering allows one to transfer energy from light to a system. Tracking the absorption provides clues about the allowed energy states in the system. The strongest signatures in such a spectrum usually come from the collective modes excited in the system. In this talk I will present new collective modes in spin-orbit coupled (SOC) systems, called the chiral-spin waves, and how...
The discovery of the lepton-number-violating neutrinoless double-beta decay process will prove that neutrinos are Majorana fermions. The Large Enriched Germanium Experiment for Neutrinoless double-beta Decay (LEGEND) project will search for this decay in $^{76}\mbox{Ge}$. In its first phase — LEGEND-200 — $200~\mbox{kg}$ of $^{76}\mbox{Ge}$-enriched high-purity germanium detectors will be...
Microvascular stalling, the process occurring when a capillary temporarily loses perfusion, has gained increasing interest
in recent years through its demonstrated presence in various neuropathologies. Despite efforts trying to
study the stalling events, investigations are hampered by their elusiveness and scarcity. In an attempt to alleviate these
hurdles, we present here a novel...
Laser applications at TRIUMF's isotope separator and accelerator facility for (i) laser ion source use and (ii) nuclear spin polarization and (iii) measurement of nuclear moments and chang3s in nuclear mean square charge radii will be presented and discussed.
Microchip single mode lasers capable of high output powers are paramount for use in photonic integrated circuits, light detection and ranging (LIDAR) for the automotive industry and remote sensing in general. Of the many developments done to miniaturize single mode lasers, we take interest in parity-time (PT) symmetric lasers. These types of lasers rely on the interplay between the gain and...
Abstract: Water Cherenkov detectors such as Super-Kamiokande are an important detector technology for Neutrino experiments. They consist of large volumes of water surrounded by phototubes that collect Cherenkov radiation created by charged particles. The characteristic Cherenkov ring reveals the particle’s information, like the energy and direction of travel. However, the Cherenkov ring is not...
The increasing availability of high-intensity radiation via synchrotron light source facilities has revolutionized paleontology research in the last couple decades. Synchrotron techniques are often non-destructive, allowing thorough imaging and chemical analysis of fossils without damaging precious specimens. Hard tissue skeletal remains such as bones and teeth have long been the only source...
The DEAP-3600 experiment is a single-phase liquid argon dark matter experiment that uses scintillation light to look for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). In addition to the dark matter search, the detector’s properties including low background and argon medium make it a good candidate for a first observation of 8B solar neutrino charged-current interactions on 40Ar. Solar...
The light-only liquid xenon (LoLX) experiment is a small-scale liquid xenon (LXe) detector with cutting-edge photo-detection technology. LoLX is designed to characterize the performance of silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs), and to study light emission, transport, and detection in LXe to inform future LXe rare-decay detectors. LoLX consists of 96 Hamamatsu VUV4 SiPMs arranged in a cylindrical...
An exact analytical expression for the probability of photon reabsorption and recycling in an idealized solar cell with Lambertian surfaces is derived. The existing approximations are found to agree with the exact formula to within a few per cent. The most accurate approximation turned out to be the simplest one that sets the reabsorption probability to the weak-absorption limit of the cell...
Investigating neutrinos’ helicity flip that could be caused by the curvature of spacetime becomes more involved when the neutrinos are, in addition, allowed to couple to a scalar field. It is, nevertheless, of great importance to investigate such a possibility if one wishes to keep up with multi-messenger astronomy and explore novel ways of bringing into evidence any eventual existence of...
Producing neutral-atom Bose-Einstein condensation, despite being a routine procedure, remains susceptible to experimental imperfections. In order to reach the condensation of widely used atomic species such as rubidium, researchers require ultrahigh vacuum, high current sources, and stable, precision lasers. The BECs are sensitive to residual magnetic fields, low-power scattered resonant...
Neutrinoless double beta decay is a proposed nuclear transition involving the emission of two electrons with no neutrinos. In $^{136}$Xe, observing the $^{136}$Ba daughter directly is a positive detection of double beta decay. This is barium tagging, and it would significantly enhance the signal to background ratio in experiments using a liquid xenon time projection chamber. However,...
Elastography is a growing area of research in which certain imaging modalities, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), are employed to measure the response of materials to external stress allowing for quantitative estimation of viscoelastic properties. This has tremendous potential in a clinical setting, as changes in tissue viscoelasticity can be indicative of myriad health conditions....
Muons are elementary particles with a finite lifetime, and their self-energy describes the interaction between a muon and the surrounding electromagnetic field. Accurate determination of the muon self-energy is essential for precision tests of the electroweak sector of the Standard Model and for probing new physics beyond the current model. In this study, we utilized the Marty program to...
In this project, we explored the fabrication of SiGe quantum dots (QDs) in a silica matrix by ion implantation. Ion implantation is an important fabrication tool in the semiconductor industry, and can be used to make compounds beyond the chemical solubility limit and allows the study of a range of concentrations of Si and Ge. The relative concentration of Ge in SiGe alloys has a direct...
We describe a low cost, simplified setup for creating a large-gain four wave mixing system in atomic Rubidium. By utilizing recent low cost, high power laser diodes and in-house construction, we have developed a system for producing narrowband, states of light in a high optical gain system.
Such systems have previously demonstrated intensity squeezing, EPR entanglement, and high purity...
The NEWS-G experiment searches for low-mass dark matter candidates at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Ontario. The direct dark matter search is performed using a spherical proportional counter (SPC) filled with light atomic mass gases. NEWS-G3 is a proposed experiment that employs the same technology as the NEWS-G experiment to search for coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEνNS) at a nuclear...
Introduction
Dielectric Wall Accelerators (DWAs), which coordinate high-gradient, nanosecond electric field pulses with particle bunch trajectory, may be suitable as compact accelerators for proton therapy. Parallel plate waveguides (PPWGs) have been proposed as a means of generating the electric field pulses. This work is a study of annular PPWGs, where electrical...
Studies of short-lived radioactive isotopes, at the limits of nuclear binding (the “drip lines”), are crucial for understanding how the nuclear force evolves toward the extremes. In neutron-deficient nuclei, measurements of β-delayed proton emission can be used to constrain proton-capture reaction pathways in nucleosynthesis and test isospin symmetry. In this talk, I will present my analysis...
PICO-500 is a large scale bubble chamber WIMP dark matter detector in its early stages of construction underground at SNOLAB. The detector will contain ~250 litres of superheated C$_3$F$_8$ (freon) contained between two quartz jars. The quartz jars will sit inside a pressure vessel filled with mineral oil that will control the pressure of the active freon volume. The entire detector will be...
The long-term objective of this project is to develop cost-effective, versatile, and scalable, short-wave infrared detectors directly integrated into silicon. Unlike the direct bandgaps materials such as Si, Si1-xGex, and Si1-x-yGexSny provide a promising path toward Si-compatible devices for SWIR detection. In this project, Si (001) samples were implanted at room temperature with a tilt of 7...
Join us for a short summary of the latest NSERC news and a brief overview of the 2023 Discovery Grant competition results. NSERC staff and the physics evaluation group Chair will be on-hand to answer questions. The CAP-NSERC Liaison Committee Chair will also provide an overview of committee activities in the last year and can answer questions.
Veuillez vous joindre à nous pour un résumé...
The concept of vibrational modes of excitation of the nuclear surface, known as phonons, was developed in the early 1950s by A. Bohr and B. Mottelson within their collective model. The observed pattern of level excitation energies and spins for nuclei believed to have a spherical shape appeared consistent with the picture of multiphonon excitations. With the confirmation of the collective...
Despite tremendous progress, key questions remain in the field of neutrino physics. Are neutrinos Dirac or Majorana fermions? What is their absolute mass scale and mass ordering? Neutrinoless double beta decay ($0\nu\beta\beta$) searches are sensitive probes aiming to answer these questions. $0\nu\beta\beta$ experiments are continuously striving to further reduce background levels in order to...
Quantum resource theories are a powerful framework for the quantification of resourcefulness in the quantum world. They arise naturally whenever one has a restriction on what one can do on a quantum system. However, the idea behind them is very general, and can be successfully exported to non-quantum scenarios. After introducing quantum resource theories and their mathematical framework, I...
Graduate studies in physics (and other fields) is going through an existential crisis. The belief that the PhD was a solid pathway to an academic career was never grounded in reality (e.g., in the US in 18-19, 1903 PhD PhDs were conferred while only 369 new tenure-track positions advertised[1]). In recent times, the sharp increase in the cost of living without corresponding funding...
High precision measurements of the ft values for superallowed Fermi β decays are crucial for providing stringent tests of electroweak theory and constraining possible new physics beyond the Standard Model. To achieve this goal, ft values for these decays must be determined experimentally to ± 0.10% or better. In this work, a high-precision half-life measurement, one of the key ingredients for...
The CAP welcomes all Congress attendees for a discussion about funding for discovery research including student support. Dr. Marc Fortin, Vice-President, Research Grants and Scholarships Directorate at NSERC, will present a summary of NSERC’s funding for discovery research and scholarship programs. The presentation will be followed by a general discussion about ways to build funding for...
The Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) experiment uses silicon and germanium calorimeters operating at cryogenic temperatures to search for dark matter interactions. In recent years, SuperCDMS HVeV (high voltage with eV resolution) detectors have enabled searches for sub-GeV dark matter candidates coupling to either nuclei or electrons such as low mass Weakly Interacting Massive...
As one moves away from stable isotopes and deeper into the neutron-rich region, the likelihood of β-delayed neutron (βn) emission decay increases. The ability to understand the neutron emission probabilities and the neutron energy spectrum can reveal details of the nuclear structure that a conventional β-decay study using only γ-ray detection cannot. We propose to build the Detector Array for...
Radon is the limiting background in many leading dark matter and low energy neutrino experiments. One way to mitigate radon background is to fill external experimental components with a clean cover gas such as N2. At SNOLAB, the radon concentration in the experiments cover gas system is monitored using a radon assay board. To improve the sensitivity of gas assays a new trapping mechanism is...
I cover an introductory article I wrote with a group of students in the French language on the concepts of quantum information in tensor network algorithm. The resulting entanglement renormalization algorithms are known to be highly efficient for both classical and quantum lattice problems in a variety of use cases. I review best practices for creating such an introductory article, when they...
I show, within the Group Field Theory (GFT) approach to quantum gravity, how cosmological physics emerges from the collective behavior of spacetime quanta, in what can be understood as the hydrodynamic limit of the underlying quantum gravity theory. In particular, I discuss explicitly how two of the most important challenges in quantum gravity (the problem of the continuum limit and the...
nEXO is a proposed experiment that aims to detect neutrinoless double beta decay (0vbb), a Standard Model (SM) forbidden, rare nuclear process that, if observed, would have profound implications for fundamental physics. Such decay would be the first experimental evidence of the Majorana nature of neutrinos (i.e., neutrinos would be their own antiparticles), provide insights into the neutrino...
We present new Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) limits on the cosmic expansion rate or relativistic energy density, quantified via the number $N_\nu$ of equivalent neutrino species. We use the latest light element observations, neutron mean lifetime, and update our evaluation for the nuclear rates d + d → $^3$He + n and d + d → $^3$H + p. Combining this result with the independent constraints...
One of the challenges faced while studying the nuclear many-body problem is the nature of the nucleon-nucleon interaction. In recent decades, models for the nucleon-nucleon interaction were produced from a power counting expansion in Chiral Effective Field theory (EFT). As a result, these modern nuclear interactions have an advantage over previously used phenomenological potentials, since they...
Support Our Science (SOS) is a grassroots organization that has been advocating for increased funding to graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in Canada. This past year they have organized a national walkout across 46 institutions coast to coast, launched multiple petitions and letter writing campaigns which have grabbed the federal government. Sarah Laframboise is this Executive...
The field equations of scalsr-tensor and viable'' Horndeski gravity can be written as effective Einstein equations with an effective dissipative fluid as a source. It is miraculous that this effective fluid obeys the constitutive relations postulated in Eckart's first-order thermodynamics, allowing one to introduce atemperature of gravity'' that describes how alternative gravity...
Nuclear theories often operate under the assumption that the strong nuclear force is charge independent. As a result, it is expected that mirror nuclei, which are identical under the exchange of total number of protons and neutrons, will have similar nuclear structures when Coulombic contributions are considered. Under the assumption of charge independence, protons and neutrons are grouped...
The MINERvA experiment was designed to measure neutrino-nucleus interactions using the NuMI beam at Fermilab. Between 2013 and 2017, 12x10^20 protons on target were delivered both in neutrino and antineutrino modes with an average neutrino energy of 6 GeV, providing a high statistics neutrino interaction data sample. Among neutrino interactions, a significant primary charged current process is...
Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) are the photo-detection technology of choice for future noble-liquid scintillator rare-event search experiments, both in neutrino-less double beta decay and dark matter. The high radio-purity and exceptional gain of SiPMs along with a high VUV detection efficiency make them ideal for these applications. The Light only Liquid Xenon (LoLX) experiment is a...
We present the utility of chains defined on causal sets in estimating continuum properties like the curvature, the proper time and the space-time dimension through a numerical analysis. In particular, we show how right continuum properties emerge in deSitter and FLRW spacetimes.
We also discuss a possible test of manifoldlikeness by considering two models of non-manifoldlike causal sets....
An understanding of the properties and behaviour of neutron-rich nuclei is essential in the study of phenomena such as neutron stars and supernovae. Successive addition of neutrons to an atomic nucleus yields isotopes that may or may not be stable: past a certain point, a nucleus experiences a decay process in which it leaks out neutrons, known as a neutron drip line. For nearly 20 years, the...
Many measurements in physics lab experiments are affected by random errors. The usual approach in such cases is to take multiple measurements and use the mean value of the measurements as the experimental value for the physical quantity. The best estimate of the uncertainty in this experimental value is the error of the mean. Students are very familiar with the concept of the mean value due...
Various forms of astrophysical evidence indicate the existence of Dark Matter (DM) which is predicted to account for about 85% of the matter in the universe. Our solar system moves through the hypothesized DM halo in our galaxy and many experiments pursuing different detection approaches are trying to observe the resulting DM particle flux.
Among them, SuperCDMS is a direct detection DM...
Using the EMPIRE 3.2 code, an optimal model has been adapted to describe the proton interaction on 232Th for accelerator-based production of 225Ra and 225Ac which are important alpha emitting medical radioisotopes with viable production in accelerators. A hybrid nuclear level density which combines the nuclear level densities in Empire for the production of 225Ra, and 225Ac has been...
Degrees of freedom are one of the first concepts that an undergraduate student in physics learns. They are used in classical mechanics, statistical physics, and QFT, among others. However, its definition is not always carefully explained. In this talk, I will present a pedagogical approach to this concept through simple (but not trivial!) mechanical systems. I will underlie the role played by...
In an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space it is possible to implement the Conjugate Gradient (CG) method to find the ground state eigenvectors and eigenvalues of a Hermitian operator H with sufficiently sparse matrix elements in a particular basis. Several different functions on the state vector can be minimized to achieve this goal.
To find excited eigenvectors and eigenvalues of operator...
Leading cosmological surveys and models provide strong indications for cold Dark Matter (DM) being one of the major constituents of our Universe. There are many experimental efforts utilizing highly sensitive, low-background detectors with the goal of observing the hypothesized flux of DM halo particles streaming through the Earth.
The SuperCDMS experiment will employ two types of...
Heavy-ion storage rings connected to radioactive beam facilities offer a unique environment for nuclear physics experiments. So far, storage rings have been only coupled to in-flight fragmentation facilities, for example the ESR and the CRYRING at GSI Darmstadt, Germany, the CSRe at HIRF in Lanzhou, China, and the Rare RI Ring at RIKEN Nishina Center in Japan.
Neutron capture reactions...
Axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) are a prominent dark matter candidate, drawing motivation in part from the axiverse of string theory. However, the string axiverse is not the only game in town: In this talk I will discuss axion-like particles that emerge as pions of a QCD-like dark sector. In a dark Standard Model (SM) wherein all 6 quark flavours are light while the photon is massive —...
Many would agree that the best way to learn physics is to do physics, such as in a research lab setting. This can be difficult in practice, as principal investigators are often working at a frenetic pace to obtain and distribute results of their work.
I will describe our efforts in setting up a funded research laboratory experience for undergraduates: The Quantum Teaching Lab (QTL). In...
Au mois de juin 2022, dans le cadre du programme de soutien à la mobilité enseignante géré par la Direction des affaires internationales de la Fédération des cégeps, un séjour scientifique de 18 jours a été réalisé dans la région du Val di Noto, au sud-est de la Sicile, en Italie, dans le but notamment de valider les informations descriptives à caractère géologique contenues dans le récit...
The Penrose inequality places a lower bound on the mass of a black hole spacetime in terms of the area of a cross-section of the event horizon. The heuristic argument for the inequality is based upon the standard picture of gravitational collapse and it has been rigorously proved in the setting of time-symmetric initial data. We will discuss the derivation of a Penrose-type inequality with...
Introducing students to quantum science at an earlier age is essential to developing the quantum workforce and fostering widespread appreciation of quantum technologies. Hands-on active learning can help make the abstract ideas of quantum information tangible to students, but lab experiments in quantum information are traditionally too expensive, too complex, or too indirect to be useful in...
Hands-on experience in a science lab is crucial for science majors, especially for those pursuing a degree in physics as it forces the engagement of different levels of knowledge in decision-making (Millar, 1994). The switch to online learning due to the pandemic placed an Everest-sized challenge at our feet; how to satisfy the experiential learning outcomes of the program when students do not...
Using an exact solution for a two-dimensional scalar field propagating in a variation of the Alcubierre metric, we analyze how apparent horizons affect localized quantized wavepackets. We analyze the loss of fringe visibility in a single-photon interferometer, and the reduction of entanglement between two 2D photons, if one photon travels through a region with spacetime curvature. We also...
The direct observation of gravitational waves was one of the most exciting events in physics in the last decade. It opened a whole new window for studying the universe and prompted a lot of interest in the observable effects of gravitational waves. One example of this is studying the effect of gravitational waves on quantum fields. In this talk I will discuss the series solution of the...
This presentation describes different ways a smartphone’s onboard magnetometer can be combined with a simple student-constructed coil of wire and used to explore relationships between electricity and magnetism. The measurement of electrical phenomena such as DC current and voltage will be discussed.
For several years students and teachers have had access to software that enables the use of...
The Lambert W function has been used in solving a variety of diverse problems in a variety of topics in physics, chemistry, engineering and mathematics. In physics, it has been useful in the study of statistical distributions such as the Planck black body, Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein distributions and the fringe fields associated with a parallel plate capacitor, the study of thermoelectric...
Physical examples are a great way to get students engaged with course content but it is not always easy to find classroom examples for senior course material. One such concept that I have been struggling with is wave modes. This concept arises naturally in mathematical physics courses and it is critical in my research area of acoustical oceanography. In searching for a classroom...
I will give an overview of gravitational-wave discoveries to date, and the advances in technology and data science that have enabled these early detections. I will summarize new physics that will be unlocked by future gravitational-wave detectors on Earth and in space.
In this talk, Dr. Grant Williams will leverage playful ideas and metaphorical thoughts to draw connections between fundamental physics concepts and such aspects of the human experience as birth, childhood, puberty, friendship, love, relationships, conflict, family, diversity, equity, inclusion, spirituality, aging, death and the beyond.
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Coherent scattering of photons in a dilute vapour of alkali atoms provides a strong link between the quantum information stored in the photonic and collective spin Hilbert spaces. In our lab we are looking at the mapping of photonic quantum states into and out of collective spins. By continuously scattering, we are creating highly correlated beams exhibiting EPR entanglement as well as...
