Launched in 2020 in partnership with the The National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP), the Innovate Seminar Series is a forum for NSBP members to share their research ideas and projects in a non-specialist way with a wide audience. The 30-minute talk (followed by 15 minutes of Q&A) will be a Zoom Webinar, and recorded. It will be available to the whole world soon after the event at KITP Online. Talks are also posted on the NSBP website https://nsbp.org/blogpost/1882533/Innovate-Seminar-Series
Hilary Utaegbulam
University of Rochester / Fermi LabReconstructing Charged Particle Interactions in Liquid Argon-like Neutrino Detectors: Liquid Argon Dead Region Interference Project (LArDRIP)
The 2x2 Demonstrator is a modular liquid argon time-projection chamber designed to serve as a prototype for the Near Detector of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). Like other neutrino detectors, the 2x2 has inactive regions wherein there is reduced or no sensitivity to charge deposition and light signals that arise from charged particle interactions with liquid argon. In the 2x2, these inactive regions are positioned in-between the active detector modules, which introduces the challenge of infering what charge signals ought to look like in these regions. The goal of this project is to train a machine learning model that uses an encoder-decoder architecture tailored for point cloud completion to learn to infer probable charge deposition configurations, given a mostly-complete point cloud. Some further goals of this project are to eventually produce a more detector-independent representation of charge particle tracks and to estimate the lost energy due to an inactive or dead region.About the Speaker
Hilary is a physics graduate student at the University of Rochester. He uses machine learning models to study neutrino physics as a member of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). Hilary is stationed at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) where he works on-site as a graduate physics researcher. Prior to joining the University of Rochester, Hilary earned his Bachelor's degree in Physics with a minor in Mathematics from the University of Houston.Hilary is a person who stutters and is also a stutter advocate. He works to leverage his position as a physics graduate student and his long-term position as a student and teacher in academia to create a more inclusive and supportive environment for people who stutter.
Wednesday, February 14, 2024 at 1:00 PM ET
Allen Pierre-Louis
Brookhaven National Laboratory & Stony Brook UniversityHigh Q^2 electron-proton elastic scattering at the future Electron-lon Collider
Unpolarized electron-proton elastic scattering cross-section measurements at high Q^2 allow for improved extractions of the proton electromagnetic form factors as well as provide constraints on possible hard two-photon exchange effects. We present a detailed study of the feasibility of making these high Q^2 e-p elastic measurements at the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). The results show that e-p elastic cross sections can be obtained in the momentum transfer range of 6 (GeV/c)2About the Speaker
Allen Pierre-Louis is a GEM fellow, Edward Bouchet fellow, Brookhaven National Laboratory staff researcher for the Center for Frontiers in Nuclear Science, and an MA student in Physics at Stony Brook University. Allen graduated from Stony Brook University with a B.S. in Physics and hopes to pursue a PhD in the subject.His research focuses on feasibility studies for the Electron Ion Collider to be built at Brookhaven and the construction of cosmic ray trackers and gas electron multipliers (GEM) detectors for the MOLLER experiment at Jefferson Laboratory. Allen is a recipient of the Brookhaven National Laboratory Augustus Prince Award. He is passionate about outreach and helped start the Stony Brook chapter of NSBP where he serves as the president. At the national level, Allen is also an NSBP student council member.
Wednesday, December 13, 2023 at 4:00 PM ET
Trevor GrandPre
Center for the Physics of Biological Function (CPBF) & Princeton Center for Theoretical Science (PCTS)Effects of linker length in Biomolecular Condensates
Biomolecular condensates are membraneless organelles formed through phase separation of macromolecules. These molecules typically consist of "sticker" regions that bind to one another connected by flexible "linker" regions. Linkers are believed to play multiple roles in condensates including filling space and adding interactions. I am currently addressing an understudied question, namely how linker length relative to other intrinsic molecular lengths affects phase separation. I'm focusing on the pyrenoid, a condensate that enhances the efficiency of photosynthesis in many green algae. The best-studied pyrenoid, that ofChlamydomonas reinhardtii, has two key components: the carbon-fixing enzyme Rubisco and EPYC1, an intrinsically disordered linker protein. To understand how EPYC1 linker length relative to Rubisco binding-site spacing affects condensation, I?ve employed both coarse-grained simulations and analytical theory. Strikingly, halving the EPYC1 linker lengths while keeping the number of stickers constant reduces critical concentrations by ten-fold. I explained this observation by introducing the concept of "molecular fit", i.e. the number of sticker bonds naturally formed between a pair of EPYC1 and Rubisco molecules. I've further explored this concept by varying the Rubisco binding-site locations. I found that the native binding-site locations yield the worst molecular fit, but are therefore optimal for phase separation. In addition, shorter linkers undergo a phase transition from a condensate to a gas of rods as Rubisco-binding sites are moved closer to the poles. These findings illustrate how intrinsically disordered proteins impact phase separation through the interplay of molecular length scales, and underscore the evolutionary pressures to optimize these lengths.About the Speaker
Trevor GrandPre is an alumnus of DePaul University and UC Berkeley where he earned his Bachelor's degree in Physics in 2014 and his PhD in 2021. Since 2021, he has been an independent postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Physics of Biological Function (CPBF), and at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science (PCTS), as well as a Schmidt Science Fellow.Monday, October 30, 2023 at 4:00 PM ET
Farrah Simpson
Brown UniversitySearch for the Vector-Like Quark, X5/3, at the Large Hadron Collider
Abstract: The discovery of the Higgs boson by both the CMS and ATLAS experiments marked a historic moment for the Large Hadron Collider because it confirmed the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics. Since then, large efforts have been made to understand the properties of the Higgs boson. However, there are still many unanswered questions in the current theoretical framework of the Standard Model, such as the hierarchy problem. Several Beyond Standard Model theories that attempt to address these questions predict the existence of vector-like quarks. In this talk, I will present the search for a vector-like quark, the X5/3. It is a strongly interacting fermionic partner of the top quark with an exotic charge +5/3. The search is conducted using CMS Run 2 datasets for events with the pair production of an X5/3 and its antiparticle which subsequently decay to a top quark and a W boson. The search is also conducted for a new decay chain where the X5/3 is allowed to decay to BSM particles. To enhance signal-to-background separation, the search is constructed for events with only one lepton in the final state to achieve unprecedented sensitivities.About the Speaker
Farrah Simpson is a rising sixth year physics PhD candidate at Brown University. She conducts research in high energy experimental physics with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Her research focuses on Beyond Standard Model physics searches for Vector-Like Quarks. She also performs methods of sensor quality control for the detector upgrades for the High Luminosity LHC. Farrah hails from the island of Jamaica and completed her undergraduate degree in Applied Physics at Columbia University. She is passionate about teaching, mentoring and advocating for historically underrepresented groups in STEM. She serves as a DEI committee member for CMS and the immediate Past Student Representative on the Executive Board of the National Society of Black Physicists. She spent the past year at Fermilab as an LHC Physics Center Graduate Scholar.Tuesday, August 29, 2023 at 4:00 PM ET