Summer Particle Astrophysics Workshop 2023 (EIEIOO)

Canada/Eastern
Melissa Baiocchi, Minya Bai (Queen's University)
Description

The 5th SummEr PartIclE AstrophysIcs WOrkshOp (EIEIOO)

This workshop series is directed at incoming undergraduate and master's students new to the field of particle astrophysics. Any individuals with an interest in the material (or looking to refresh their skills) are welcome to join for any aspects of the workshop. No prior knowledge is required for participants to attend.

Sessions consist of introductory lectures, experimental talks, and coding workshops. We are excited to announce we have over thirty speakers and the timetable is now available!

The workshop is running in hybrid form this year. All sessions will be broadcast live over zoom with closed captioning enabled. Speakers at Queen's University will present in person in Stirling Hall with live streaming over the same zoom line. Lectures will be recorded and made available after the workshop.

 

Connection Information

All connections will be done through Zoom. The link is sent directly to attendees emails. All sessions will be recorded and made available to registrants.

A discord is available for asking questions and socializing: https://discord.gg/Rr32WzEz

Feel free to post questions on the workshops and talks in their respective channels!

If you have any questions, including those related to content or registration, please contact Melissa Baiocchi at m.baiocchi@queensu.ca

Participants
  • Adele Gryba
  • Aidan McClung
  • Akshat Gandhi
  • Alex Fullerton
  • Alex Yuan
  • Alexandre Beaubien
  • Amy Browne
  • Annabelle Makowski
  • Anthony Allega
  • Anthony Sandhar-Cruz
  • Ariana Bakhtyari
  • BECKY IMAFIDON
  • Christopher Cappiello
  • Constantin Yonter
  • Cora Neave
  • Daniel Durnford
  • David Raudales
  • Debangshi Karmakar
  • Debbie morris
  • Florent Thibault
  • Frédéric Cai
  • Fábio Carmo
  • Gabriel Huyer
  • Gary Sweeney
  • Hannah Fronenberg
  • Irina Nitu
  • Isabel Trigger
  • Isabelle Ngo
  • Isis Alvarado
  • Ivanna Boras
  • James Baker
  • Jessica Rudd
  • Joan Alejandro Dos Santos
  • Joana Vences
  • Kate Hobbs
  • Katharine Jekic
  • Krittika Sarkar
  • Lance Schonberg
  • Lucie Boudreault
  • Mahmood Salman
  • Marc-Antoine Leclerc
  • Matt Marzano
  • Melissa Baiocchi
  • Michaela Robert
  • Myla Weiman
  • Nasim Fatemighomi
  • Nikhil Menda
  • Riya Rai
  • Rory Macdonald
  • Ruchi Soni
  • Rufat Dost
  • Sahara Karima Mosin Rahimani
  • Sam Paudel
  • Samik Dutta
  • Sandhya Rottoo
  • Sarah Cornish
  • Scott oser
  • Shashvat Varma
  • Simran Hiranandani
  • Spencer Keller
  • Tatum Soward
  • Victoria Howard
  • Wallison Luiz Anicezio Campanelli
  • Wesley Luo
  • Will Parker
  • Yilda Boukhtouchen
  • Yusen Qiu
  • Zachary Kenny
  • +83
    • 12:00 12:30
      Introduction 30m
      Speaker: Melissa Baiocchi
    • 12:30 13:30
      Introduction to Particle Physics 1h

      "It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to."

      In-Person (Stirling Rm 501)

      Speaker: Benjamin Tam (Queen's University)
    • 13:30 14:00
      Break 30m
    • 14:00 15:00
      Particle Astrophysics Overview 1h

      Particle astrophysics lies at the rich interface between astrophysics, cosmology and fundamental physics. It aims to find answers for the most fundamental questions about our universe, its origin and evolution, using the complementary information provided by the cosmic messengers that arrive to us: cosmic rays, neutrinos, photons and gravitational waves.

      This lecture aims at telling the story of the origins of astroparticle physics, the current puzzles that need to be solved, while presenting the different cosmic messengers from a very experimental perspective.

      Virtual

      Speaker: Ana Sofia Inacio
    • 15:00 16:00
      Lunch 1h
    • 16:00 18:00
      Intro to Unix Command Line Interface (CLI) and Tools for Scientific Computing 2h

      Virtual

      Speaker: David Gallacher
    • 12:30 13:30
      Astronomy Overview 1h

      In-Person (Stirling Rm 501)

      Speaker: Stéphane Courteau
    • 13:30 13:45
      Break 15m
    • 13:45 14:45
      Multi-Messenger Astrophysics 1h

      In-Person (Stirling Rm 501)

      Speaker: Nahee Park
    • 14:45 15:00
      Break 15m
    • 15:00 16:00
      Accelerator Physics 1h

      Virtual

      Speaker: Brigitte Vachon (McGill University, (CA))
    • 16:00 17:00
      Lunch 1h
    • 17:00 17:30
      ATLAS 30m

      The ATLAS detector is one of the two general-purpose experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider that discovered the Higgs boson. It performs precision measurements of the properties and interactions of Higgs bosons, top quarks, W and Z bosons, and (nearly) all the other particles in the Standard Model. But how do we design an experimental apparatus to measure particles whose existence is so fleeting that they decay instantly, in the vacuum of the beam pipe, without ever reaching the detector? The talk will be a lightning introduction to both the ATLAS detector and the collaboration of thousands of scientists who built and operate it and sift through the wealth of data it provides.

      Virtual

      Speaker: Isabel Trigger (TRIUMF (CA))
    • 17:30 18:00
      BELLE II 30m

      The Belle II detector is a general-purpose detector located at the SuperKEKB particle collider (the highest luminosity collider ever). It is the successor experiment to Belle and BaBar, whose experimental confirmation of B-meson CP violation predicted by the Kobayashi-Masakawa theory led to the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics.

      This intro talk will give you a quick walkthrough of how the highest precision collider experiment in the world is built and operated by over a thousand scientists and what kind of Physics it seeks to achieve.

      Virtual

      Speaker: Alexandre Beaubien
    • 12:00 13:00
      Direct and In-Direct Detection 1h

      This talk will cover two ways of searching for dark matter: direct and indirect detection. Direct detection uses sensitive particle detectors to search for dark matter colliding with nuclei or electrons in the lab, allowing us to measure or constrain its scattering cross section. In indirect detection, we search for astronomical signals—such as photons and cosmic rays—which could have been produced by dark matter decay or annihilation. I will briefly discuss evidence for dark matter, and the argument for the popular WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particle) model of dark matter. I will then cover techniques used for indirect detection. We will discuss several observed excesses, unexplained astrophysical signals that could be caused by dark matter, and see how different observations and background modeling can challenge or constrain the dark matter interpretation of these signals. We will then cover the history of direct detection, and the basics of computing detection rates. We will end by looking at how different types of direct detection experiment are optimized to search for different models of dark matter, motivating a wide variety of different techniques and technologies.

      In-Person (Stirling Rm 501)

      Speaker: Christopher Cappiello
    • 13:00 13:15
      Break 15m
    • 13:15 13:45
      PMTs 30m

      In-Person (Stirling Rm 501)

      Speakers: Peter Skensved, Yilda Boukhtouchen (Queen’s University)
    • 13:45 14:00
      Break 15m
    • 14:00 15:00
      Neutrino Overview 1h

      In-Person (Stirling Rm 501)

      Speaker: Arthur McDonald
    • 15:00 15:30
      SNO+ 30m

      In-Person (Stirling Rm 501)

      Speaker: Alex Wright (IPP/Queen's University)
    • 15:30 16:30
      Lunch 1h
    • 16:30 17:00
      Super-Kamiokande 30m

      Virtual

      Speakers: Ali Ajmi, Anthony Allega (Queen's University)
    • 17:00 17:30
      nEXO 30m

      Virtual

      Speakers: Anthony Allega (Queen's University), Thomas Brunner (McGill University)
    • 17:30 18:00
      IceCube 30m

      In-Person (Stirling Rm 501)

      Speakers: Anthony Allega (Queen's University), Patrick Hatch (Queen's University)
    • 18:00 18:30
      Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE) 30m

      The Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment is a new neutrino telescope in the Pacific Ocean. Consisting of 70 instrumented mooring lines, P-ONE aims to detect neutrinos with energies ranging from TeV to PeV, and will cover areas of the sky that are yet uncovered by the other existing neutrino telescopes.

      Following two successful pathfinder missions, the P-ONE collaboration is now developing the first mooring line of P-ONE. This mooring line is expected to be deployed in 2024 and will demonstrate the feasibility of a larger installation.
      The presentation will give a short overview of the pathfinder missions and the current status of P-ONE.

      Virtual

      Speakers: Andreas Gaertner, Anthony Allega (Queen's University)
    • 12:30 13:30
      Balloon Physics 1h

      In-Person (Stirling Rm 501)

      Speaker: Laura Fissel (Queen's University)
    • 13:30 14:00
      Break 30m
    • 14:00 14:30
      CCAT 30m

      In-Person (Stirling Rm 501)

      Speaker: Mayukh Bagchi (Queen's University)
    • 14:30 15:00
      HELIX 30m

      Virtual

      Speaker: Nahee Park
    • 15:00 16:00
      Lunch 1h
    • 16:00 18:00
      Statistics and Error Analysis 2h

      In this whirlwind review of elementary statistics, I will cram half a semester's worth of material into the bare minimum necessary to make use of popular statistical techniques like fitting, chi-squared estimation, and Bayesian analysis. I will probably fail. 😉

      Virtual

      Speaker: Scott Oser
    • 12:30 13:30
      Academic Presentations 1h
      Speakers: Blaire Flynn (SNOLAB), Juliette Deloye (SNOLAB)
    • 13:30 14:00
      Break 30m
    • 14:00 14:30
      Medical Physics 30m

      Virtual

      Speaker: Liz Fletcher (Carleton University)
    • 14:30 15:00
      Superallowed Beta Decays 30m

      Superallowed Fermi $\beta$ Decay: The precision frontier of nuclear physics

      Dr. Gwen Grinyer (she/her)

      Department of Physics, University of Regina, Regina, SK S4S 0A2, Canada

      High precision measurements of the ft values for superallowed Fermi $\beta$ decays provide fundamental data with which to constrain the conserved vector current (CVC) hypothesis, set limits on the Standard Model description of electroweak interactions, and test unitarity of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) quark mixing matrix. In this lecture, I will present the status of the world data on the superallowed Fermi $\beta$ emitters and explain how we go from state-of-the-art measurements in the lab to extracting fundamental physics at the precision frontier.

      Virtual

      Speaker: Prof. Gwen Grinyer
    • 15:00 16:00
      Lunch 1h
    • 16:00 18:00
      Python 2h

      Introduction to Python!

      Power point : https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nXaZIDt4WC83qW3L7TKHp3KK1Rmdxzjh/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=109215338010014774265&rtpof=true&sd=true

      Colab notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1VVvvl8rD05QmJgt6LaOmXOdy7PN60XeO?usp=sharing

      Virtual

      Speakers: Anthony Allega (Queen's University), Hannah Fronenberg (McGill University)
    • 12:30 14:30
      C++ 2h

      In-Person (Stirling Rm 501)

      Speaker: Jonathan Hucker
    • 14:30 15:30
      Lunch 1h
    • 15:30 16:00
      SBC 30m

      Virtual

      Speakers: Marie Cecile Piro (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)), Nicholas Swidinsky (Queen's University)
    • 16:00 16:30
      PICO 30m
      Speakers: Colin Moore, Nicholas Swidinsky (Queen's University)
    • 16:30 17:00
      NEWS-G 30m

      Virtual

      Speakers: Mr Daniel Durnford (University of Alberta), Nicholas Swidinsky (Queen's University)
    • 17:00 17:30
      SuperCDMS 30m

      The Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) Collaboration uses cryogenic semiconductor detectors to look for evidence of dark matter interactions with ordinary matter. The current generation of the experiment is under construction at the SNOLAB underground facility in Sudbury, Canada. Two complimentary detector designs, interleaved Z-sensitivity Ionization and Phonon (iZIP) detectors and High Voltage (HV) detectors, made of Germanium or Silicon will be used to probe low mass dark matter parameter space. This talk will provide an overview of the experiment and detector technology and present the expected sensitivity of SuperCDMS SNOLAB to different detection channels.

      Virtual

      Speakers: Eleanor Fascione (TRIUMF/Queen's University), Nicholas Swidinsky (Queen's University)
    • 12:30 14:30
      ROOT 2h

      A tutorial on programming with ROOT!

      There will be a small project to work through in the second half of the session. To be able to work along through it you will need to have ROOT installed. As this can take some time, it will be better to try and install ROOT beforehand. As everyone will have different machinery setups, it's difficult to give exact instructions, but hopefully this can get you started. But if you are unable to get ROOT installed, the instructor will work though the examples live, and you can watch along and in that way still be able to take part in the tutorial.

      ROOT install instructions:

      There are many ways to get ROOT. There are lots more details here https://root.cern/install/, so if the below doesn't work for you check out the info there. It will be quicker to get the pre-compiled binaries, but if that doesn't work for whatever reason you can try building from source.

      The first thing to do is make sure you have all the things ROOT depends on. A list of these, with instructions for different operating systems, can be found here: https://root.cern/install/dependencies/

      MacOS:

      Install homebrew https://brew.sh
      Install XCode from the App Store
      In a terminal, type: brew install root
      cd root
      source /usr/local/Cellar/root/6.26.06_2/bin/thisroot.sh (maybe the version and/or location are different)

      Unix:

      Get the precompiled binaries for your system from here:https://root.cern/releases/release-62802/
      tar xvf root_v6.28.02.Linux-centos8-x86_64-gcc8.5.tar
      source root/bin/thisroot.sh
      More detailed walk through https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QItrmchEQWE (he builds from source but you can do this with the precompiled tar files)

      Windows:

      I think you should have access to Windows Subsystem for Linux or similar
      It will probably be easiest to use the above Unix instructions within that
      Then install XMing https://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/
      type: export DISPLAY="localhost:0"
      More detailed walk through https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmfM4Zq6OQU (he builds from source but you can do this with the precompiled tar files)

      (Alternative) Building from Source:

      Once you have the dependencies, get the source file here https://root.cern/releases/release-62802/
      cd root
      ./configure --disable-castor --disable-rfio --disable-x11 --disable-gfal --disable-ldap (these disabled options are all things I've found problems with on various systems, and we won't need them for the simple examples/project)
      make
      source bin/thisroot.sh

      To check it's worked, type root. The terminal prompt should now be root [0]. If so, it seems root is installed ok! Now try TCanvas c1, if a blank window pops up, the graphics are all working too and you are good to go :)

      If that all sounds like gobbledigook, please do not worry!! In the tutorial we will try and go through the installation process. (It can take time though so ideally we want to get as far through the process as possible beforehand.) But if you can't get it installed in time, you can just watch the tutorial without working along with it and that will be fine!

      If you're having problems but are keen, there are many resources you can use online. https://root.cern/install/ is the place to start but there are countless guides, videos, and forums online. Someone will have encountered your problem before, it's working out what to google which can be tricky! Hopefully this is enough to get you started and point you in the direction of where to find info for your specific setup.

      Good luck! And to reiterate, if you can't get root installed, it won't completely preclude you from taking part in the tutorial

      In-Person (Stirling Rm 501)

      Speaker: William Parker
    • 14:30 15:30
      Lunch 1h
    • 15:30 17:30
      Machine Learning 2h

      In-Person (Stirling Rm 501)

      Speakers: Jean-Marie Coquillat, Mark Anderson, Noah Rowe
    • 17:30 17:45
      Break 15m
    • 17:45 18:15
      Closing 30m
      Speakers: Melissa Baiocchi, Minya Bai (Queen's University)
    • 18:15 19:15
      Mandatory Fun 1h