Heavy ion collisions serve as an excellent testing ground to study the strong interaction, described by quantum chromodynamics, under extremely high temperatures. In that environment, a short-lived medium of deconfined matter, called the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), is formed. A hard scattering between partons from the incident nuclei can result in the production of highly energetic partons that...
The computational challenge posed by Large Hadron Collider(LHC) experiments is a formidable one, and with the advent of the High-Luminosity LHC upgrade, there is an increasing demand for efficient utilization of computational resources. The High-Level Trigger 2(HLT2) at the LHCb experiment is the CPU-based second step of the trigger chain that selects physics objects at offline-quality for...
Axion-like particles (ALPs) are pseudo Goldstone bosons that emerge in the low-energy limit of various extensions of the Standard Model. Concrete ALP models include the axion proposed to solve the strong CP problem and can provide a portal to dark matter. In this talk, we focus on searches for ALPs using top quark measurements at the LHC. Since the ALP couples more strongly to heavier...
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a next-generation neutrino oscillation experiment currently under construction in the United States. The far detector site (at SURF) and near detector site (at Fermilab) are separated by a baseline of 1300 km. At the near detector site, a liquid argon detector (ND-LAr) with 70 optically separated time projection chambers (TPCs) will be...
KM3NeT is an underwater neutrino telescope which detects the Cherenkov radiation created by the products of neutrino interactions. To accurately reconstruct neutrino events, a precise determination of the position and orientation of the optical modules, which detect the Cherenkov radiation, is required. As the detector elements sway with the deep sea currents, a continuous tracking of the...
An important approach to fully understanding the mechanism how particles acquire mass is the coupling between the Higgs boson to first-generation fermions and to second-generation quarks. Among the searches for these types of coupling, the Higgs boson decay to charm quarks is the most promising mode to investigate. This talk will focus on the latest results of the Higgs boson to charm decay...
The PTOLEMY collaboration aims to detect the Cosmic Neutrino Background, the signal of neutrino freeze-out 1 second after the Big Bang. The CNB has been predicted, but not yet been measured. In this talk, I will give an overview of the PTOLEMY experiment and the challenges that need to be solved to make this experiment viable. Specifically, I will talk about progress on the development of the...
Soon to be located in the North hall of PARTREC, Groningen, the NEXT experiment intends to produce Neutron-rich EXotic heavy nuclei in multi-nucleon Transfer reactions. By measuring the masses of these exotic nuclei to high precision, their internal nuclear structure can be probed. These masses can also be used as input data for nucleosynthesis models.
Once produced, the transfer products...
Track reconstruction is a crucial part of High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments. Traditional methods for the task scale poorly, making machine learning and deep learning appealing alternatives. Following the success of transformers in the field of language processing, we investigate the feasibility of training a transformer to translate detector signals into track parameters. We study and...
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) has been in operation on the International Space Station since May 19th, 2011, and it will continue its mission for the duration of the space station's operational lifespan. Throughout its data-taking period in space, AMS-02 has successfully registered a remarkable count of over 200 billion cosmic-ray events.
AMS-02 has been primarily designed to...
In this talk I will present a tasty quantum dessert selected from the extensive quantum trilogy -- Power of the invisible: the quantessence of reality —a three part book that I have completed and that will appear in December.
I hope to share the pleasure of finding out how this rock solid and yet elusive show piece of physics actually works.
Axion-like particles – ALPs – are predicted in many extensions of the Standard Model with a spontaneously broken symmetry. If ALPs exist in Nature, they leave interesting signatures at colliders and other experiments. In this talk, you will hear about new ideas to probe axion-like particles with GeV-scale masses. I will show how to combine observables with resonant and virtual ALPs to explore...
