Summer Particle (Astro) Physics Workshop (2022)

3 May 2022, 12:00 → 12 May 2022, 20:00 America/Toronto

Melissa Baiocchi, Sarah Dawson

The 4th Summer Particle Astrophysics Workshop

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.

Preparatory instructions for students, including required (free) software, will be posted here in the days leading to the start of the workshop.

A timetable is now available!

 

This workshop is running again in 2023. Register here: https://indico.cern.ch/event/eieioo2023 

 

Connection Information

All connections will be done through Zoom. The link has been sent directly to attendees emails. All sessions will be recorded and made available to registrants. Registration was closed temporarily due to virtual participant limits, but has now been reopened!

If you have any questions, including those related to content or registration, please contact Melissa Baiocchi at baiocchm@mcmaster.ca or Sarah Dawson at sd178@queensu.ca

Session recordings

Most sessions will be recorded. A document containing links to all recordings has been made available to all participants. If you don't have the link or are not able to access the file, please contact one of the organizers.

Sponsorships

Thanks to 3D Printing Canada for sponsoring this workshop! Check out their website here: https://3dprintingcanada.com/

Details about the  Kywoo Tycoon 3D printer provided for this workshop can be found by clicking this link.

Tuesday 3 May

12:00 → 12:30 Introductory Remarks

Speaker: Melissa Baiocchi

EIEIOO2022_Introductory_Remarks.pdf

12:30 → 13:30 Introduction to Particle Physics

"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."

Speaker: Benjamin Tam (Queen's University)

Intro_particle_2022.pdf

14:00 → 15:00 Accelerator Physics Overview

Speaker: Brigitte Vachon (McGill University, (CA))

Vachon-MI-SummerStudent-2022.pdf

15:00 → 16:00 Lunch

16:00 → 18:00 Introduction to Unix Command Line Interface (CLI) and tools for scientific computing

This workshop includes a crash course in Unix filesystems, including navigation, file permissions and other useful common commands, including shell scripts. We will also discuss shell scripts and Docker containers. Time permitting, we will cover an introduction to networked computing and DevOps for scientific computing.

Speaker: David Gallacher

Summer Astroparticle Physics Workshop - Computing Session.pdf

Wednesday 4 May

12:30 → 13:00 Scintillating Bubble Chambers

The SBC Collaboration is constructing a 10-kg liquid argon bubble chamber with scintillation readouts. The goal is to achieve 100 eV nuclear recoils detection with near-complete discrimination against electron recoil events. In addition to a dark matter search, SBC targets a CEvNS measurement of MeV-scale neutrinos from nuclear reactors. A high-statistics, high signal-to-background detection would enable precision searches for physics beyond the standard model. In this talk, after giving a brief introduction to dark matter and challenges, I will present the physics reach of the SBC detectors and the advantages of using such technology.
I will also discuss the progress towards the construction at Fermilab to test the sub-keV threshold performance and at SNOLAB for the search for dark matter.

Speaker: Marie-Cécile Piro

MCPiro_SBC_SummerWorkshop2022.pdf

13:00 → 13:30 SNO+

Speaker: Alex Wright (IPP/Queen's University)

14:00 → 15:00 Particle Astrophysics Overview

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.

Speaker: Ana Sofia Inacio (Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partícul)

AstroparticlephysicsOverview.pdf

15:00 → 16:00 Lunch

16:00 → 18:00 Statistics and Error Analysis

A Crash Course in Statistics: In this two-hour whirlwind session, I'll introduce basic principles of frequentist and Bayesian statistics and  illustrate the most common statistical techniques used in particle physics.

Speaker: Scott Oser

oser_statistics_crashcourse.pdf

Thursday 5 May

12:00 → 14:00 Git

Speaker: Carter Rhea

Slides for presentation

15:00 → 16:00 Lunch

16:00 → 18:00 ROOT

Root is a C++-based data analysis environment that is supported by CERN. This will be a two-hour tutorial style introduction to Root, including the basic functionality, basic data structures, and how to read and write data. The available documentation and how to use it will be discussed.

The zip file contains materials that you will need in order to participate in the workshop

Speaker: Chris Jillings

2022-Indoc-Root.pdf

SPAW2022_ROOT_workshop_materials.zip

Friday 6 May

12:30 → 13:30 Neutrinos: Past, Present and Future

This talk will give a short overview of neutrino physics, including their initial motivation and discovery, the solar neutrino problem and its resolution by the SNO experiment. The talk will end with current open questions in neutrino physics.

Speaker: Ryan Martin

Neutrinos_SummerStudents_RMartin_May22.pdf

14:00 → 15:00 Dark Matter Overview

Over the past several decades physicists have made remarkable progress in understanding the fundamental building blocks of nature. Yet there remains much we still do not know. One of the biggest open questions in our Universe is the nature of dark matter. Cosmological and astrophysical observations point to the existence of a non-luminous and mysterious form of matter that is far more abundant than all the visible matter in our Universe. This substance, which we simply refer to as ""dark matter"", holds our Universe together. It is responsible for the formation of galaxies, the solar system and ultimately life as we know it.
In this one hour lecture, I will discuss how particle and astro-physicists have been trying to answer two questions, What is dark matter? and How do we find it? The lecture will focus on the current status of dark matter searches. In particular, how connections between diverse searches from the laboratory to the cosmos could help deepen our understanding of dark matter.

Speaker: Gopolang Mohlabeng (Queen's University)

15:00 → 16:00 Lunch

16:00 → 16:30 Indirect Dark Matter Detection

The session will provide a short introduction to indirect searches for dark matter, with cosmic rays, gamma rays, neutrinos and cosmology.

Speaker: Aaron Vincent (Queen's University)

16:30 → 17:00 Superallowed Beta Decays

Speaker: Gwen Grinyer (University of Regina)

GwenGrinyer_Superallowed.pdf

17:00 → 17:30 Belle-II

Belle II and it's accelerator SuperKEKB are setting world records for the amount of data produced and collected in e^+ e^- collisions. This huge data set is being used to test the standard model through incredibly precise measurements of predictions made by the standard model and beyond. This session will outline the Belle II detector, our event selection algorithms, and highlights from our new physics results.

Speaker: Caleb Miller

Miller_B2_2022_QSI.pdf

17:30 → 18:00 PICO

The PICO collaboration operates freon-filled bubble chambers for the direct detection of dark matter, focused primarily on the spin dependent WIMP-proton regime. This session will describe the history and basics of bubble chambers as particle detectors, their role in dark matter direct detection, and the PICO-40L chamber. PICO-40L is the current generation of bubble chamber being assembled at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Canada, which is planned to begin re-commissioning in summer 2022.

Speaker: Colin Moore

Monday 9 May

13:00 → 15:00 Python

In this two-hour workshop we will cover python topics for beginners and also some tips and tricks that more experienced python users can implement into their coding practices. We will cover an introduction to python as a programming language, an overview of basic python objects and their built-in functions. We will also go over some of my favourite python libraries and modules for scientific programming. Time permitting, I will give a quick crash course in writing test code which is one way in which any programmer can level-up their coding game. This session will be highly interactive with coding demo’s, exercises, and exploration time built into the workshop’s schedule.

Speaker: Hannah Sousa-Fronenberg

Intro_python.pdf

15:00 → 16:00 Lunch

16:00 → 17:00 Academic Presentations

An interactive workshop to help you develop presentation and communication skills to share your science and make it engaging. Includes information on how to create presentations, visuals, posters, and how to make your talks accessible.

Speaker: Jenna Saffin

Academic presentations resources- summer astroparticle workshop 2022.pdf

17:00 → 17:30 DarkSide

Dark matter search is a high priority endeavour in our field. Building larger and more sensitive detectors underground in the next decades will provide an opportunity for new discoveries, but it will also require new technological developments to achieve that. Liquid argon has been used by many collaborations already and has proven to deliver high quality data, but one of the challenges that future experiments will need to address is a background intrinsic to atmospheric argon itself in a form of argon-39. In this class, I will go over lessons learned from past experiments, how those can be applied to future projects and what strategies are being developed to address the intrinsic argon background.

Speaker: Szymon Manecki (Queen's University)

Tuesday 10 May

14:00 → 14:30 SuperCDMS

The Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) experiment uses cryogenic semiconductor detectors instrumented with superconducting transition edge sensors to search for interactions caused by low-mass dark matter particles. In this talk I will describe the detection principle, experimental setup, and calibration and energy reconstruction techniques used by SuperCDMS that allow it to have excellent sensitivity to light dark matter.

Speaker: Richard Germond

14:30 → 15:00 P-ONE

Speaker: Andreas Gaertner (University of Alberta)

15:00 → 16:00 Lunch

16:00 → 16:30 NEWS-G

Speaker: Daniel Durnford

16:30 → 17:00 Medical Physics Overview

An overview of the field of medical physics with an emphasis on how it is related to particle physics.

Speaker: Liz Fletcher (Carleton University)

17:00 → 17:30 ATLAS

Speaker: Isabel Trigger (TRIUMF (CA))

17:30 → 18:00 Super-Kamiokande

The discovery of neutrino oscillation in atmospheric neutrinos by Super-Kamiokande (Super-K) and solar neutrinos by the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) led to their experiment's PIs sharing the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics. Both of these are water Chernkov detectors, Super-K with light water, and SNO with heavy water. A new generation of water Cherenkov detectors is being built to make precision measurements of neutrino oscillation, and to search for a potentially large CP-violation of neutrinos. This talk will present a brief physics overview of neutrino oscillation, and progress towards building a new Intermediate Water Cherenkov Detector in the J-PARC beamline that will be part of the next generation of CP-violation searches with neutrinos.

Speakers: Dr Ali Ajmi, Blair Jamieson (University of Winnipeg)

Wednesday 11 May

13:00 → 13:30 PMT's

Speaker: Peter Skensved

eieioo_light_detection_v2.pdf

14:00 → 14:30 The Majorana Demonstrator and LEGEND experiments

This talk will give a short overview of experiments that utilize high purity germanium detectors to search for neutrinoless double-beta decay and ultimately understand whether the neutrino is a Dirac of Majorana particle.

Speaker: Ryan Martin

GeRMLab_SummerStudents_May22.pdf

14:30 → 15:00 Dark Matter Modulation and the COSINUS Experiment

Speaker: Matthew Stukel

15:00 → 16:00 Lunch

16:00 → 16:30 nEXO

Speaker: Thomas Brunner (McGill University)

20220511-EIEIOO-summer-student-workshop.pdf

16:30 → 17:00 Watchman

Speaker: Leon Pickard

17:00 → 17:30 ANNIE

Speaker: Leon Pickard

Thursday 12 May

14:00 → 15:00 Multi-Messenger Astronomy

Speaker: Ken Clark (Queen's University)

15:00 → 16:00 Lunch

16:00 → 18:00 C++

This session aims to provide students with introductory working knowledge of C++. We will explore commonly used syntax with some example code. Exercises will also be provided to guide participants in further understanding of the principles. Time permitting, a brief tie-in with ROOT will also be given.

Speaker: Ian Lam (Queen's University, Canada)

cpp_tut.pdf

summer_tutorial_2022.zip

18:00 → 18:10 Closing Remarks

18:10 → 19:30 Mandatory Fun!