n 2010 the Large Hadron Collider collided for the first time lead ions with a Lorentz gamma factor exceeding 1000. Such ultrarelativistic collisions create a quark-gluon plasma with an extremely high temperature. I will explain the basic physics of such collisions and then showcase very new results of similar collisions of oxygen and neon that were just performed last summer. Oxygen and neon...
The first experimental measurement of the leptonic decay $B_c^+ \rightarrow \tau^+ \nu_\tau$ is eagerly awaited by the high energy particle physics community.
Such a measurement provides a sensitive probe of physics beyond the Standard Model and complements the measurements of $\mathcal{R}(D)$ and $\mathcal{R}(D^*)$, which show puzzling differences with the Standard Model predictions, as both...
High-energy cosmic rays constantly bombard Earth's atmosphere from outer space, initiating particle cascades called air showers. The Pierre Auger Observatory is the largest observatory in the world dedicated to detecting these air showers. It consists of more than 1,600 surface detectors distributed over an area of 3,000 km². Recently, the surface detectors underwent a major upgrade, called...
The aim of the NEXT experiment in Groningen is the study of the decay properties and masses of Neutron rich EXotic heavy nuclei produced in multi-nucleon Transfer reactions. This type of reaction comes with the experimental challenge of a wide angular distribution of the reaction products. To overcome this challenge, the NEXT experiment uses a solenoid separator to separate and to focus the...
The permanent electric dipole moment (EDM) of a fundamental particle is a CP violating property, and can be used as a sensitive probe for physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM). The electron leaves a greatly enhanced EDM signature when bound to a heavy polar molecule. This has allowed molecular precision measurements to explore well into the parameter space of BSM theories. A next generation...
Quantum chromodynamics predicts a phase transition from hadronic matter to deconfined quarks at extreme densities, yet its exact nature remains uncertain. Neutron stars offer a unique opportunity to probe this transition, but bulk properties—mass, radius and tidal deformability—provide only indirect signatures, which require many detections to resolve and are ineffective if the discontinuity...
Since the first detection of a gravitational wave (GW) in 2015, more than 300 confident detections have been made, making data analysis increasingly computationally demanding. As the next generation of ground-based detectors is expected to increase the number of detections by three orders of magnitude, new and efficient inference methods are needed. A Neural Likelihood Estimator (NLE) has...
The quantum field theory of dark matter scattering has been extensively explored for numerous direct detection experiments. However, pseudoscalar-mediated interactions, such as those involving axion-like particles, have received comparatively little attention, primarily because they are both spin-dependent and momentum-suppressed. In this talk, I will discuss how several theoretical mechanisms...
Due to their scientific importance, e.g., in the fields of nuclear physics and cosmology, the scientific community is eagerly waiting to detect more neutron star mergers.
Motivated by this, we study the gravitational-wave trigger GW231109_235456, a sub-threshold neutron star merger candidate observed in the first part of the fourth observing run of the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA collaboration....
The High-Luminosity LHC will subject vertex detectors to unprecedented radiation levels, requiring sensors that can withstand fluences up to $10^{17}$ n$_{\text{eq}}$/cm$^2$ while maintaining excellent spatial and temporal resolution. This work presents the development of 3D silicon pixel sensors for the second upgrade of the LHCb Vertex Locator (VELO). Unlike planar sensors, 3D sensors...
Proton radioactivity provides a unique probe of nuclear structure far from stability and for odd-Z elements it is expected to be the decay mode that determines the limit of observability for neutron deficient nuclei. Establishing these boundaries of observability and identifying the nuclear structure at these limits is a long-standing challenge in nuclear physics. The nuclei in the region of...
The identification of hadronic jets originating by either bottom, charm or light quarks, called flavor tagging, is a fundamental technique in many analyses at the LHC. Since 2017, this has been performed using deep learning models based on graph neural networks architecture, leveraging information from the inner tracking detector and the calorimeters. Accurate tagging is especially critical...
