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SMU Physicist Explains Significance of Latest Cern Discovery Related to the Higgs Boson

Stephen Sekula says observation of the Higgs particle transforming into bottom quarks confirms the 20th-century recipe for mass

DALLAS (SMU) – Scientists conducting physics experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have announced the discovery of the Higgs boson transforming, as it decays, into subatomic particles called bottom quarks, an observation that confirms that the “Standard Model” of the universe – the 20th century recipe for everything in the known physical world – is still valid.

This new discovery is a big step forward in the quest to understand how the Higgs enables fundamental particles to acquire mass. Many scientists suspect that the Higgs could interact with particles outside the Standard Model, such as dark matter – the unseen matter that does not emit or absorb light, but may make up more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe.

After several years of work experiments at both ATLAS and CMS – CERN detectors that use different types of technology to investigate a broad range of physics –have demonstrated that 60 percent of Higgs particles decay in the same way. By finding and mapping the Higgs boson interactions with known particles, scientists can simultaneously probe for new phenomena.

SMU played important roles in the analysis announced by CERN Aug. 28, including:

  • Development of the underlying analysis software framework (Stephen Sekula, SMU associate professor of physics was co-leader of the small group that included SMU graduate student Peilong Wang and post-doctoral researcher Francesco Lo Sterzo, that does this for the larger analysis for 2017-2018)
  • Studying background processes that mimic this Higgs boson decay, reducing measurement uncertainty in the final result.

“The Standard Model is the recipe for everything that surrounds us in the world today.  Sekula explained. “It has been tested to ridiculous precision. People have been trying for 30-40 years to figure out where or if the Standard Model described matter incorrectly. Like any recipe you inherit from a family member, you trust but verify. This might be grandma’s favorite recipe, but do you really need two sticks of butter? This finding shows that the Standard Model is still the best recipe for the Universe as we know it.”

Scientists would have been intrigued if the Standard Model had not survived this test, Sekula said, because failure would have produced new knowledge.

“When we went to the moon, we didn’t know we’d get Mylar and Tang,” Sekula said. “What we’ve achieved getting to this point is we’ve pushed the boundaries of technology in both computing and electronics just to make this observation. Technology as we know it will continue to be revolutionized by fundamental curiosity about why the universe is the way it is.

“As for what we will get from all this experimentation, the honest answer is I don’t know,” Sekula said. “But based on the history of science, it’s going to be amazing.”

About CERN

At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. They use the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter – the fundamental particles. The particles are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives the physicists clues about how the particles interact, and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature. Founded in 1954, the CERN laboratory sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva.

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas.  SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

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SMU physicist and her students join national laboratories, other universities in high-stakes hunt for elusive dark matter

The future SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment will hunt for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), hypothetical components of dark matter. If a WIMP (white trace) strikes an atom inside the experiment's detector crystals (gray), it will cause the crystal lattice to vibrate (blue). The collision will also send electrons (red) through the crystal that enhance the vibrations. (Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

“One of our major concerns is background particles that can mimic the dark matter signature in our detectors.” — Jodi Cooley

SMU physicist Jodi Cooley is a member of the international scientific team that will use a powerful new tool to understand one of the biggest mysteries of modern physics.

The U.S. Department of Energy has approved funding and start of construction for SuperCDMS SNOLAB, a $34 million experiment designed to detect dark matter.

SuperCDMS will begin operations in the early 2020s to hunt for hypothetical dark matter particles called weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs.

“Understanding the nature of dark matter is one of the most important scientific puzzles in particle astrophysics today,” said Cooley, an associate professor of experimental particle physics. “The experiment will have unprecedented sensitivity to dark matter particles that are hypothesized to have very low mass and interact very rarely. So they are extremely challenging to detect. This challenge has required us to develop cutting edge detectors.”

Cooley is one of 111 scientists from 26 institutions in the SuperCDMS collaboration. SMU graduate students on the experiment include Matt Stein (Ph.D. ’18) and Dan Jardin; and also previously Hang Qiu (Ph.D. ’17).

Physicists are searching for dark matter because although it makes up the bulk of the universe it remains a mystery. They theorize that dark matter could be composed of dark matter particles, with WIMPs a top contender for the title.

If dark matter WIMP particles exist, they would barely interact with their environment and fly right through regular matter. However, every so often, they could collide with an atom of our visible world, and dark matter researchers are looking for these rare interactions.

The SuperCDMS experiment will be the world’s most sensitive for detecting the relatively light WIMPs.

Cooley and her students in the SMU Department of Physics have been working with Washington-based Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on the challenge of background control and material selection for the experiment’s WIMP detectors.

Understanding background signals in the experiment is a major challenge for the detection of the faint WIMP signals.

“One of our major concerns is background particles that can mimic the dark matter signature in our detectors,” Cooley said. “As such, the experiment is constructed from radiopure materials that are carefully characterized through a screening and assay before they are selected.”

The SMU research team also has performed simulations of background particles in the detectors.

“Doing this helps inform the design of the experiment shield,” Cooley said. “We want to select the right materials to use in construction of the experiment. For example, materials that are too high in radioactivity will produce background particles that might produce fake dark matter signals in our detectors. We are extremely careful to use materials that block background particles. We also take great care that the material we use to hold the detectors in place — copper — is very radiopure.”

The experiment will be assembled and operated within the existing Canadian laboratory SNOLAB – 6,800 feet underground inside a nickel mine near the city of Sudbury. That’s the deepest underground laboratory in North America.

The experiment’s detectors will be protected from high-energy particles, called cosmic radiation, which can create the unwanted background signals that Cooley’s team wants to prevent.

SuperCDMS SNOLAB will be 50 times more sensitive than predecessor
Scientists know that visible matter in the universe accounts for only 15 percent of all matter. The rest is the mysterious substance called dark matter.

Due to its gravitational pull on regular matter, dark matter is a key driver for the evolution of the universe, affecting the formation of galaxies like our Milky Way. It therefore is fundamental to our very own existence.

The SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment will be at least 50 times more sensitive than its predecessor, exploring WIMP properties that can’t be probed by other experiments.

The search will be done using silicon and germanium crystals, in which the collisions would trigger tiny vibrations. However, to measure the atomic jiggles, the crystals need to be cooled to less than minus 459.6 degrees Fahrenheit — a fraction of a degree above absolute zero temperature.

The ultra-cold conditions give the experiment its name: Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, or CDMS. The prefix “Super” indicates an increased sensitivity compared to previous versions of the experiment.

Experiment will measure “fingerprints” left by dark matter
The collisions would also produce pairs of electrons and electron deficiencies that move through the crystals, triggering additional atomic vibrations that amplify the signal from the dark matter collision. The experiment will be able to measure these “fingerprints” left by dark matter with sophisticated superconducting electronics.

Besides Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, two other Department of Energy national labs are involved in the project.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California is managing the construction project. SLAC will provide the experiment’s centerpiece of initially four detector towers, each containing six crystals in the shape of oversized hockey pucks. SLAC built and tested a detector prototype. The first tower could be sent to SNOLAB by the end of 2018.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is working on the experiment’s intricate shielding and cryogenics infrastructure.

“Our experiment will be the world’s most sensitive for relatively light WIMPs,” said Richard Partridge, head of the SuperCDMS group at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, a joint institute of SLAC and Stanford University. “This unparalleled sensitivity will create exciting opportunities to explore new territory in dark matter research.”

Close-knit network of strong partners is crucial to success
Besides SMU, a number of U.S. and Canadian universities also play key roles in the experiment, working on tasks ranging from detector fabrication and testing to data analysis and simulation. The largest international contribution comes from Canada and includes the research infrastructure at SNOLAB.

“We’re fortunate to have a close-knit network of strong collaboration partners, which is crucial for our success,” said Project Director Blas Cabrera from KIPAC. “The same is true for the outstanding support we’re receiving from the funding agencies in the U.S. and Canada.”

Funding is from the DOE Office of Science, $19 million, the National Science Foundation, $12 million, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, $3 million.

SuperCDMS to search for dark matter in entirely new region
“Together we’re now ready to build an experiment that will search for dark matter particles that interact with normal matter in an entirely new region,” said SuperCDMS spokesperson Dan Bauer, Fermilab.

SuperCDMS SNOLAB will be the latest in a series of increasingly sensitive dark matter experiments. The most recent version, located at the Soudan Mine in Minnesota, completed operations in 2015.

”The project has incorporated lessons learned from previous CDMS experiments to significantly improve the experimental infrastructure and detector designs for the experiment,” said SLAC’s Ken Fouts, project manager for SuperCDMS SNOLAB. “The combination of design improvements, the deep location and the infrastructure support provided by SNOLAB will allow the experiment to reach its full potential in the search for low-mass dark matter.” — SLAC National Laboratory; and Margaret Allen, SMU

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Solving the dark energy mystery: A new sky survey assignment for a 45-year-old telescope

SMU and other members of a scientific consortium prepare for installation of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument to survey the night sky from a mile-high mountain peak in Arizona

As part of a large scientific consortium studying dark energy, SMU physicists are on course to help create the largest 3-D map of the universe ever made.

The map will emerge from data gathered by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) being installed on the Nicholas U. Mayall Telescope atop a mountain in Arizona.

The map could help solve the mystery of dark energy, which is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe.

DESI will capture about 10 times more data than a predecessor survey of space using an array of 5,000 swiveling robots. Each robot will be carefully choreographed to point a fiber-optic cable at a preprogrammed sequence of deep-space objects, including millions of galaxies and quasars, which are galaxies that harbor massive, actively feeding black holes.

“DESI will provide the first precise measures of the expansion history of the universe covering approximately the last 10 billion years,” said SMU physicist Robert Kehoe, a professor in the SMU Department of Physics. “This is most of the 13 billion year age of the universe, and it encompasses a critical period in which the universe went from being matter-dominated to dark-energy dominated.”

The universe was expanding, but at a slowing pace, until a few billion years ago, Kehoe said.

“Then the expansion started accelerating,” he said. “The unknown ‘dark energy’ driving that acceleration is now dominating the universe. Seeing this transition clearly will provide a critical test of ideas of what this dark energy is, and how it may tie into theories of gravitation and other fundamental forces.”

The Mayall telescope was originally commissioned 45 years ago to survey the night sky and record observations on glass photographic plates. The telescope is tucked inside a 14-story, 500-ton dome atop a mile-high peak at the National Science Foundation’s Kitt Peak National Observatory – part of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.

SMU researchers have conducted observing with the Mayall. Decommissioning of that telescope allows for building DESI in it’s place, as well as reusing some parts of the telescope and adding major new sytems. As part of DESI, SMU is involved in development of software for operation of the experiment, as well as for data simulation to aid data anlysis.

“We are also involved in studying the ways in which observational effects impact the cosmology measurements DESI is pursuing,” Kehoe said. SMU graduate students Govinda Dhungana and Ryan Staten also work on DESI. A new addition to the SMU DESI team, post-doctoral researcher Sarah Eftekharzadeh, is working on the SMU software and has studied the same kinds of galaxies
DESI will be measuring.

Now the dome is closing on the previous science chapters of the 4-meter Mayall Telescope so that it can prepare for its new role in creating the 3-D map.

The temporary closure sets in motion the largest overhaul in the telescope’s history and sets the stage for the installation of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, which will begin a five-year observing run next year.

“This day marks an enormous milestone for us,” said DESI Director Michael Levi of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , which leads the project’s international collaboration. “Now we remove the old equipment and start the yearlong process of putting the new stuff on.”

More than 465 researchers from about 71 institutions are participating in the DESI collaboration.

The entire top end of the telescope, which weighs as much as a school bus and houses the telescope’s secondary mirror and a large digital camera, will be removed and replaced with DESI instruments. A large crane will lift the telescope’s top end through the observing slit in its dome.

Besides providing new insights about the universe’s expansion and large-scale structure, DESI will also help to set limits on theories related to gravity and the formative stages of the universe, and could even provide new mass measurements for a variety of elusive yet abundant subatomic particles called neutrinos.

“One of the primary ways that we learn about the unseen universe is by its subtle effects on the clustering of galaxies,” said DESI collaboration co-spokesperson Daniel Eisenstein of Harvard University. “The new maps from DESI will provide an exquisite new level of sensitivity in our study of cosmology.”

Mayall’s sturdy construction is perfect platform for new 9-ton instrument
The Mayall Telescope has played an important role in many astronomical discoveries, including measurements supporting the discovery of dark energy and establishing the role of dark matter in the universe from measurements of galaxy rotation. Its observations have also been used in determining the scale and structure of the universe. Dark matter and dark energy together are believed to make up about 95 percent of all of the universe’s mass and energy.

It was one of the world’s largest optical telescopes at the time it was built, and because of its sturdy construction it is perfectly suited to carry the new 9-ton instrument.

“We started this project by surveying large telescopes to find one that had a suitable mirror and wouldn’t collapse under the weight of such a massive instrument,” said Berkeley Lab’s David Schlegel, a DESI project scientist.

Arjun Dey, the NOAO project scientist for DESI, explained, “The Mayall was precociously engineered like a battleship and designed with a wide field of view.”

The expansion of the telescope’s field-of-view will allow DESI to map out about one-third of the sky.

DESI will transform the speed of science with automated preprogrammed robots
Brenna Flaugher, a DESI project scientist who leads the astrophysics department at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, said DESI will transform the speed of science at the Mayall Telescope.

“The telescope was designed to carry a person at the top who aimed and steered it, but with DESI it’s all automated,” she said. “Instead of one at a time we can measure the velocities of 5,000 galaxies at a time – we will measure more than 30 million of them in our five-year survey.”

DESI will use an array of 5,000 swiveling robots, each carefully choreographed to point a fiber-optic cable at a preprogrammed sequence of deep-space objects, including millions of galaxies and quasars, which are galaxies that harbor massive, actively feeding black holes.

The fiber-optic cables will carry the light from these objects to 10 spectrographs, which are tools that will measure the properties of this light and help to pinpoint the objects’ distance and the rate at which they are moving away from us. DESI’s observations will provide a deep look into the early universe, up to about 11 billion years ago.

DESI will capture about 10 times more data than a predecessor survey
The cylindrical, fiber-toting robots, which will be embedded in a rounded metal unit called a focal plate, will reposition to capture a new exposure of the sky roughly every 20 minutes. The focal plane assembly, which is now being assembled at Berkeley Lab, is expected to be completed and delivered to Kitt Peak this year.

DESI will scan one-third of the sky and will capture about 10 times more data than a predecessor survey, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). That project relied on a manually rotated sequence of metal plates – with fibers plugged by hand into pre-drilled holes – to target objects.

All of DESI’s six lenses, each about a meter in diameter, are complete. They will be carefully stacked and aligned in a steel support structure and will ultimately ride with the focal plane atop the telescope.

Each of these lenses took shape from large blocks of glass. They have criss-crossed the globe to receive various treatments, including grinding, polishing, and coatings. It took about 3.5 years to produce each of the lenses, which now reside at University College London in the U.K. and will be shipped to the DESI site this spring.

Precise measurements of millions of galaxies will reveal effects of dark energy
The Mayall Telescope has most recently been enlisted in a DESI-supporting sky survey known as the Mayall z-Band Legacy Survey, which is one of four sky surveys that DESI will use to preselect its targeted sky objects. SMU astrophysicists carried out observing duties on that survey, which wrapped up just days ago on Feb. 11, to support the coming DESI scientific results.

Data from these surveys are analyzed at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility. Data from these surveys have been released to the public at http://legacysurvey.org.

“We can see about a billion galaxies in the survey images, which is quite a bit of fun to explore,” Schlegel said. “The DESI instrument will precisely measure millions of those galaxies to see the effects of dark energy.”


Levi noted that there is already a lot of computing work underway at the Berkeley computing center to prepare for the stream of data that will pour out of DESI once it starts up.

“This project is all about generating huge quantities of data,” Levi said. “The data will go directly from the telescope to the Berkeley computing center for processing. We will create hundreds of universes in these computers and see which universe best fits our data.”

Installation of DESI’s components is expected to begin soon and to wrap up in April 2019, with first science observations planned in September 2019.

“Installing DESI on the Mayall will put the telescope at the heart of the next decade of discoveries in cosmology,” said Risa Wechsler, DESI collaboration co-spokesperson and associate professor of physics and astrophysics at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University. “The amazing 3-D map it will measure may solve some of the biggest outstanding questions in cosmology, or surprise us and bring up new ones.” — Berkeley Lab and SMU

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Exploring the mysteries of the universe: Reality in the Shadows

New knowledge has caused us to reconsider many previous conclusions about what the universe is and how it works.

Despite centuries of scientific advancements, there is much about the universe that remains unknown. New knowledge and discoveries in the last 20 years have challenged previously accepted ideas and theories that were once regarded as scientific truth and have subjected them to increasing scrutiny.

These additions to our knowledge have caused scientists to reconsider many previous conclusions about what the universe is and how it works.

““Reality in the Shadows”” or “What the Heck’s the Higgs?” is a new book that explores the concepts that shape our current understanding of the universe and the frontiers of our knowledge of the cosmos.

The authors — two physicists and an engineer — tell us in a manner that non-scientists can readily follow, why studies have moved to superstring theory/M-theory, ideas about extra dimensions of space, and ideas about new particles in nature to find answers. It also explores why these ideas are far from established as accurate descriptions of reality.

“Our book explains how we know what we know about the universe, what we don’t know, and what we wish we did know,” said co-author Stephen Sekula, an associate professor of Physics at SMU. A physicist, Sekula conducts research into the Higgs Boson at the energy frontier on CERN’s ATLAS Experiment.

The book was initiated by Frank Blitzer, an engineer who participated on national space programs like Apollo and Patriot, several years ago, Sekula said. He was joined by co-author S. James Gates Jr., well known for his work on supersymmetry, supergravity and superstring theory, a few years ago.

“Frank and Jim sought additional input to help complete the book, and serendipitously Frank’s grandson, Ryan, was an SMU undergraduate and Hunt Scholar who helped connect them to me,” Sekula said. “After over an additional year of work, the book was completed.”

The foundations of modern physics rest on ideas that are over 100 years old and battle-tested, Sekula said.

“But nature has offered us new puzzles that have not yet been successfully explained by those ideas,” he added. “Perhaps we don’t yet have the right idea, or perhaps we haven’t searched deep enough into the cosmos. These are exciting times, with opportunities for a new generation of physicists who might crack these puzzles. Our book will help a curious reader to see the way in which knowledge was established, and encourage them to be engaged in solving the new mysteries.”

“Reality in the Shadows,” available through YBK Publishers, describes how humanity came to learn the workings of the universe as groundwork for the science that found the Higgs particle. Now scientists are hunting for the explanations for dark matter and the accelerated expansion of the cosmos, as well as for the many new questions the Higgs Boson itself has raised.

Scientists have recently discovered colliding black holes and neutron stars, that there is more non-luminous matter (dark matter) in the universe than the ordinary stuff of everyday life, and that the universe seems to grow larger each second at a faster and faster rate. Readers will learn how scientists discern such features of the universe and begin to see how to think beyond what is known to what is not yet known.

Throughout the book are descriptions of important developments in theoretical physics that lead the reader to a step-by-step understanding.

Sekula teaches physics and conducts research at ATLAS. He contributed to the measurement of decay modes of the Higgs boson and to the measurement of its spin-parity quantum numbers. Complementary to these efforts, he has worked with colleagues on the ATLAS Experiment to search for additional Higgs bosons in nature, providing intellectual leadership and direct involvement in several searches.

Gates was named 2014 “Scientist of the Year” by the Harvard Foundation. He was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in 2013 and received the 2013 National Medal of Science, the highest recognition given to scientists by the United States.

Gates has been featured on many TV documentary programs on physics, including “The Elegant Universe,” “Einstein’s Big Idea,” “Fabric of the Cosmos” and “The Hunt for the Higgs.” His DVD series, “Superstring Theory: The DNA of Reality,” makes the complexities of unification theory comprehensible.

Blitzer has more than 50 years of experience in engineering, program management, and business development and participated on national space programs, and The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), holding several patents in guidance and control. He has spent more than 20 years in independent research of the subject of the book.

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The CW33: Dark Matter Day rocks SMU’s campus

The CW33 TV visited SMU on Halloween to get a glimpse of International Dark Matter Day in action on the SMU campus.

The CW33 TV stopped at the SMU campus during the early morning hours of Halloween to interview SMU physics professor Jodi Cooley about the capers afoot in celebration of International Dark Matter Day.

The SMU Department of Physics in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences hosted the Oct. 31, 2017 Dark Matter Day celebration for students, faculty, staff and Dallas-area residents.

As part of the festivities, there were speaking events by scientists in the field of dark matter, including dark matter expert Cooley, to explain the elusive particles that scientists refer to as dark matter.

Then throughout Halloween day, the public was invited to test their skills at finding dark matter — in this case, a series of 26 rocks bearing educational messages related to dark matter, which the Society of Physics Students had painted and hidden around the campus. Lucky finders traded them for prizes from the Physics Department.

“In the spirit of science being a pursuit open to all, we are excited to welcome all members of the SMU family to become dark matter hunters for a day,” said Cooley, whose research is focused on the scientific challenge of detecting dark matter. “Explore your campus in the search for dark matter rocks, just as physicists are exploring the cosmos in the hunt for the nature of dark matter itself.”

Watch the full news segment.

EXCERPT:

By Shardae Neal
The CW33
On Halloween (excuse us) “International Dark Matter Day,” SMU students hosted a public witch hunt to search for the unknown: dark matter.

“What we’re doing is hiding 26 rocks that we have with the help of our society of physic students,” explained SMU Physicist Jodi Cooley.

What exactly is dark matter?

“Think about all the stuff there is in the universe,” Cooley added. “What we can account for makes up only four to five percent of the universe. The rest of it is unknown. Turns out 26% of that unknown stuff is dark matter.”

Watch the full news segment.

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SMU Dark Matter Day celebration culminates in a dark matter rock hunt on Halloween

“In the spirit of science being a pursuit open to all, we are excited to welcome all members of the SMU family to become dark matter hunters for a day.” — SMU physicist Jodi Cooley

This Halloween, people around the world will be celebrating the mysterious cosmic substance that permeates our universe: dark matter.

At SMU, the Department of Physics in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences is hosting a Dark Matter Day celebration, and students, faculty, staff and DFW residents are invited to join in the educational fun with events open to the public.

To kick off the festivities, two speaking events by scientists in the field of dark matter will familiarize participants with the elusive particles that scientists refer to as dark matter. The first talk is oriented toward the general public, while the second is more technical and will appeal to people familiar with one of the STEM areas of science, technology, engineering or mathematics, particularly physics and astrophysics.

Then throughout Halloween day, everyone is invited to test their skills at finding dark matter — in this case, a series of rocks bearing educational messages related to dark matter, which the Society of Physics Students has painted and then hidden around the campus.

Anyone lucky enough to find one of the 26 rocks can present it at the Physics Department office to receive a prize, says SMU physics professor Jodi Cooley, whose research is focused on the scientific challenge of detecting dark matter.

“In the spirit of science being a pursuit open to all, we are excited to welcome all members of the SMU family to become dark matter hunters for a day,” Cooley said. “Explore your campus in the search for dark matter rocks, just as physicists are exploring the cosmos in the hunt for the nature of dark matter itself.”

Anyone who discovers a dark matter rock on the SMU campus is encouraged to grab their phone and snap a selfie with their rock. Tweet and tag your selfie #SMUDarkMatter so that @SMU, @SMUResearch and @SMUPhysics can retweet photos of the lucky finders.

As SMU’s resident dark matter scientist, Cooley is part of the 100-person international SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment, which uses ultra pure materials and highly sensitive custom-built detectors to listen for the passage of dark matter.

SuperCDMS, an acronym for Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, resides at SNOLAB, an existing underground science laboratory in Ontario, Canada. Located deep underground, SNOLAB allows scientists to use the earth as a shield to block out particles that resemble dark matter, making it easier to see the real thing.

The SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment, expected to be operational in 2020, has been designed to go deeper below the surface of the earth than earlier generations of the research.

“Dark matter experiments have been a smashing success — they’ve progressed farther than anyone anticipated. The SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment is quite unique,” Cooley said. “It will allow us to probe models that predict dark matter with the tiniest masses.”

For more on Cooley’s research, go to “Hunt for dark matter takes physicists deep below earth’s surface, where WIMPS can’t hide.“ — Margaret Allen, SMU

Dark Matter Day events at SMU:

  • Sunday, Oct. 29, 4 p.m., McCord Auditorium — Maruša Bradač, Associate Professor at the University of California at Davis, will give a public lecture on dark matter. A reception will follow the lecture from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. in the Dallas Hall Rotunda with beverages and light snacks. This event is free and open to the public, and is designed to be open to the widest possible audience.
  • Monday, Oct. 30, 4 p.m., Fondren Science Building, Room 158 — SMU Associate Professor Jodi Cooley will present a seminar on the SuperCDMS direct-detection dark matter search experiment. This event is part of the Physics Department Speaker Series. While this event is open to the public, it will be a more technical talk and may appeal more to an audience interested in the STEM areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, especially physics and astrophysics.
  • Tuesday, Oct. 31, 9 a.m. – 4 p.m., SMU Main Campus, Dark Matter Rock Hunt — The SMU Department of Physics has hidden “dark matter rocks” all across the SMU main campus. If you discover one of the dark matter rocks, bring it to the main office of the Physics Department, Fondren Science Building, Room 102, and get a special prize. All SMU students, faculty, staff and community members are welcome to join in the search.
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A Total Eclipse of the First Day of School

Hundreds of students, faculty and townspeople gathered in the rotunda of Dallas Hall on Monday, Aug. 21 to view a projection of the Great American Solar Eclipse at a viewing hosted by Dedman College and the SMU Physics Department. (Jeff McWhorter/SMU)

Dedman College, SMU Physics Department host Great American Solar Eclipse 2017 viewing

Thousands of students, faculty and townspeople showed up to campus Monday, Aug. 21 to observe the Great American Solar Eclipse at a viewing hosted by Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences and the SMU Department of Physics.

The festive event coincided with the kick-off of SMU’s Fall Semester and included Solar Eclipse Cookies served while viewing the rare astronomical phenomenon.

The eclipse reached its peak at 1:09 p.m. in Dallas at more than 75% of totality.

“What a great first day of the semester and terrific event to bring everyone together with the help of Dedman College scientists,” said Dedman Dean Thomas DiPiero. “And the eclipse cookies weren’t bad, either.”

Physics faculty provided indirect methods for observing the eclipse, including a telescope with a viewing cone on the steps of historic Dallas Hall, a projection of the eclipse onto a screen into Dallas Hall, and a variety of homemade hand-held devices.

Outside on the steps of Dallas Hall, Associate Professor Stephen Sekula manned his home-built viewing tunnel attached to a telescope for people to indirectly view the eclipse.

“I was overwhelmed by the incredible response of the students, faculty and community,” Sekula said. “The people who flocked to Dallas Hall were energized and engaged. It moved me that they were so interested in — and, in some cases, had their perspective on the universe altered by — a partial eclipse of the sun by the moon.”

A team of Physics Department faculty assembled components to use a mirror to project the eclipse from a telescope on the steps of Dallas Hall into the rotunda onto a screen hanging from the second-floor balcony.

Adjunct Professor John Cotton built the mount for the mirror — with a spare, just in case — and Professor and Department Chairman Ryszard Stroynowski and Sekula arranged the tripod setup and tested the equipment.

Stroynowski also projected an illustration of the Earth, the moon and the sun onto the wall of the rotunda to help people visualize movement and location of those cosmic bodies during the solar eclipse.

Professor Fred Olness handed out cardboard projectors and showed people how to use them to indirectly view the eclipse.

“The turn-out was fantastic,” Olness said. “Many families with children participated, and we distributed cardboard with pinholes so they could project the eclipse onto the sidewalk. It was rewarding that they were enthused by the science.”

Stroynowski, Sekula and others at the viewing event were interviewed by CBS 11 TV journalist Robert Flagg.

Physics Professor Thomas Coan and Guillermo Vasquez, SMU Linux and research computing support specialist, put together a sequence of photos they took during the day from Fondren Science Building.

“The experience of bringing faculty, students and even some out-of-campus community members together by sharing goggles, cameras, and now pictures of one of the great natural events, was extremely gratifying,” Vasquez said.

Sekula said the enthusiastic response from the public is driving plans to prepare for the next event of this kind.

“I’m really excited to share with SMU and Dallas in a total eclipse of the sun on April 8, 2024,” he said.

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Dallas Innovates: SMU, UTA Scientists To Help Unlock Mystery of Neutrinos

A massive particle detector a mile underground is the key to unlocking the secrets of a beam of neutrinos that will be shot beneath the Earth from Chicago to South Dakota.

Reporter Lance Murray with Dallas Innovates reported on the research of biochemistry professors Thomas E. Coan in the SMU Department of Physics.

Coan is one of about 1,000 scientists around the world collaborating on DUNE — a massive particle detector being built a mile underground in South Dakota to unlock the mysteries of neutrino particles.

The research is funded by the by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science in conjunction with CERN and international partners from 30 countries.

SMU is one of more than 100 institutions from around the world building hardware for the massive international experiment that may change our understanding of the universe. Construction will take years and scientists expect to begin taking data in the middle of the next decade, said Coan.

The Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) will house the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. When complete, LBNF/DUNE will be the largest experiment ever built in the United States to study the properties of the mysterious particles called neutrinos.

The Dallas Innovates article, “SMU, UTA Scientists To Help Unlock Mystery of Neutrinos,” published July 28, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Lance Murray
Dallas Innovates
Construction of a huge particle detector in South Dakota could lead to a change in how we understand the universe, and scientists from the University of Texas at Arlington and Southern Methodist University in Dallas will play roles in helping to unlock the mystery of neutrinos.

Ground was broken a mile underground recently at the Sanford Underground Research Facility at the Homestake Gold Mine in Lead, South Dakota for the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) that will house the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).

SMU physicist Thomas E. Coan, and UTA Physics professors Jonathan Asaadi and Jaehoon Yu will be among scientists from more than 100 institutions around the world who will be involved in the experiment.

DUNE will be constructed and operated at the mine site by a group of about 1,000 scientists and engineers from 30 nations.

The Homestake Mine was the location where neutrinos were discovered by Raymond Davis Jr. in 1962. It was the the largest and deepest gold mine in North America until its closure in 2002.

LBNF/DUNE will be the biggest experiment ever built in the U.S. to study the properties of neutrinos, one of the fundamental particles that make up the universe.

“DUNE is designed to investigate a broad swath of the properties of neutrinos, one of the universe’s most abundant but still mysterious electrically neutral particles,” Coan said in the release.

These puzzling particles are similar to electrons, but they have one huge difference — they don’t carry an electrical charge. Neutrinos come in three types: the electron neutrino, the muon, and the tau.

What is the experiment’s goal? Coan said it seeks to understand strange phenomena such as neutrinos changing identities in mid-flight — known as “oscillation” — as well as the behavioral differences between a neutrino and its anti-neutrino sibling.

“A crisp understanding of neutrinos holds promise for understanding why any matter survived annihilation with antimatter from the Big Bang to form the people, planets, and stars we see today,” Coan said in the release. “DUNE is also able to probe whether or not the humble proton, found in all atoms of the universe, is actually unstable and ultimately destined to eventually decay away. It even has sensitivity to understanding how stars explode into supernovae by studying the neutrinos that stream out from them during the explosion.”

Coan also is involved in another massive particle detector in northern Minnesota knows as NOvA, where he is a principal investigator.

Read the full story.

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Construction begins on international mega-science neutrino experiment

Groundbreaking held today in South Dakota marks the start of excavation for the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, future home to the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

SMU is one of more than 100 institutions from around the world building hardware for a massive international experiment — a particle detector — that could change our understanding of the universe.

Construction will take years and scientists expect to begin taking data in the middle of the next decade, said SMU physicist Thomas E. Coan, a professor in the SMU Department of Physics and a researcher on the experiment.

The turning of a shovelful of earth a mile underground marks a new era in particle physics research. The groundbreaking ceremony was held Friday, July 21, 2017 at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota.

Dignitaries, scientists and engineers from around the world marked the start of construction of the experiment that could change our understanding of the universe.

The Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) will house the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Called DUNE for short, it will be built and operated by a group of roughly 1,000 scientists and engineers from 30 countries, including Coan.

When complete, LBNF/DUNE will be the largest experiment ever built in the United States to study the properties of mysterious particles called neutrinos. Unlocking the mysteries of these particles could help explain more about how the universe works and why matter exists at all.

“DUNE is designed to investigate a broad swath of the properties of neutrinos, one of the universe’s most abundant but still mysterious electrically neutral particles,” Coan said.

The experiment seeks to understand strange phenomena like neutrinos changing identities — called “oscillation” — in mid-flight and the behavioral differences between a neutrino an its anti-neutrino sibling, Coan said.

“A crisp understanding of neutrinos holds promise for understanding why any matter survived annihilation with antimatter from the Big Bang to form the people, planets and stars we see today,” Coan said. “DUNE is also able to probe whether or not the humble proton, found in all atoms of the universe, is actually unstable and ultimately destined to eventually decay away. It even has sensitivity to undertanding how stars explode into supernovae by studying the neutrinos that stream out from them during the explosion.”

Coan also is a principal investigator on NOvA, another neutrino experiment collaboration of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Laboratory. NOvA, in northern Minnesota, is another massive particle detector designed to observe and measure the behavior of neutrinos.

Similar to NOvA, DUNE will be a neutrino beam from Fermilab that runs to Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota. DUNE’s beam will be more powerful and will take the measurements NOvA is taking to an unprecedented precision, scientists on both experiments have said. Any questions NOvA fails to answer will most certainly be answered by DUNE.

At its peak, construction of LBNF is expected to create almost 2,000 jobs throughout South Dakota and a similar number of jobs in Illinois.

Institutions in dozens of countries will contribute to the construction of DUNE components. The DUNE experiment will attract students and young scientists from around the world, helping to foster the next generation of leaders in the field and to maintain the highly skilled scientific workforce in the United States and worldwide.

Beam of neutrinos will travel 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) through the Earth
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, located outside Chicago, will generate a beam of neutrinos and send them 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) through the Earth to Sanford Lab, where a four-story-high, 70,000-ton detector will be built beneath the surface to catch those neutrinos.

Scientists will study the interactions of neutrinos in the detector, looking to better understand the changes these particles undergo as they travel across the country in less than the blink of an eye.

Ever since their discovery 61 years ago, neutrinos have proven to be one of the most surprising subatomic particles, and the fact that they oscillate between three different states is one of their biggest surprises. That discovery began with a solar neutrino experiment led by physicist Ray Davis in the 1960s, performed in the same underground mine that now will house LBNF/DUNE. Davis shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2002 for his experiment.

DUNE scientists will also look for the differences in behavior between neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos, which could give us clues as to why the visible universe is dominated by matter.

DUNE will also watch for neutrinos produced when a star explodes, which could reveal the formation of neutron stars and black holes, and will investigate whether protons live forever or eventually decay, bringing us closer to fulfilling Einstein’s dream of a grand unified theory.

Construction over the next 10 years is funded by DOE with 30 countries
But first, the facility must be built, and that will happen over the next 10 years. Now that the first shovel of earth has been moved, crews will begin to excavate more than 870,000 tons of rock to create the huge underground caverns for the DUNE detector.

Large DUNE prototype detectors are under construction at European research center CERN, a major partner in the project, and the technology refined for those smaller versions will be tested and scaled up when the massive DUNE detectors are built.

This research is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science in conjunction with CERN and international partners from 30 countries.

DUNE collaborators come from institutions in Armenia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Greece, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Madagascar, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Romania, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom and the United States. — Fermilab, SMU

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CTNewsJunkie.com: Ignoring Science At Our Own Peril

“A scientific theory is a very well-tested explanation, built from facts, confirmed hypotheses, and inferences.” — SMU physicist Stephen Sekula

An Op-Ed in the online Connecticut news outlet CTNewsJunkie.com tapped the expertise of SMU Associate Professor of Physics Stephen Sekula.

The writer of the piece, High School English teacher Barth Keck at Haddam-Killingworth High School, quoted the comments of Sekula, who spoke to Keck’s media literacy class.

The opinion piece, “Ignoring Science At Our Own Peril,” addressed the issue of science illiteracy. The editorial published April 14, 2017.

Sekula was among the SMU physicists at Geneva-based CERN — seat of the world’s largest collaborative physics experiment — in December 2011 who found hints of the long sought after Higgs boson, dubbed the fundamental “God” particle.

Sekula conducts research at the energy frontier through CERN’s ATLAS Experiment. He co-convened the ATLAS Higgs Subgroup 6: Beyond-the-Standard Model Higgs Physics from 2012-2013. He is involved in the search for additional Higgs bosons. He also is an authority on big data and high-performance computing.

Read the full Op-Ed.

EXCERPT:

By Barth Keck
CTNewsJunkie.com
Last week was a newsworthy week — at least for this high school English teacher.

In a story out of Hartford last Wednesday, the state Board of Education officially eliminated the requirement that standardized test scores be tied to teacher evaluations. The move, while controversial, was a common-sense decision that recognizes the many problems created by evaluations based on standardized tests. A newsworthy development, indeed, for anyone interested in education.

Even so, a more newsworthy event for me occurred on Tuesday when Southern Methodist University professor Stephen Sekula visited English and science classes at his alma mater and my workplace, Haddam-Killingworth High School. Speaking to my students in Media Literacy, Sekula explained in vivid detail how scientists rigorously and deliberately employ the scientific method in their never-ending search for answers. It is with similar vigilance, he explained, that individuals must consider the multitude of messages around them to become truly “media-literate.”

“A scientific theory is a very well-tested explanation, built from facts, confirmed hypotheses, and inferences,” according to the physics professor. “It is more powerful than a fact because it explains facts.”

Unfortunately, said Sekula, the word “theory” is often likened to “opinion” in public dialogue — as in “human-caused climate change is just a theory” — but there’s an essential difference between theory and opinion. Scientists know the difference, of course, but so should all citizens. Thus, a media-literate person sees a red flag whenever someone — a “pseudoscientist” — uses “theory” and “opinion” interchangeably.

“Pseudoscience readily admits opinions and equates that with the idea of scientific theory,” explained Sekula, “requiring no high quality evidence to make explanatory claims about the world.”

And there it was: the explanation for so much happening in the public sphere right now. Fake news, conspiracy theories, science-averse officials appointed to science-dependent federal agencies. Professor Sekula’s message could not be more timely and, therefore, newsworthy.

Read the full Op-Ed.

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SMU Research Day 2017 visitors query SMU students on the details of their research

The best in SMU undergraduate and graduate research work was on full display at Research Day in the Hughes Trigg Student Center.

More than 150 graduate and undergraduate students at SMU presented posters at SMU Research Day 2017 in the Promenade Ballroom of Hughes-Trigg Student Center Ballroom on March 28.

Student researchers discussed their ongoing and completed SMU research and their results with faculty, staff and students who attended the one-day event.

Explaining their research to others is a learning experience for students, said Peter Weyand, Glenn Simmons Professor of Applied Physiology and professor of biomechanics in the Department of Applied Physiology and Wellness in SMU’s Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development.

“Research Day is an opportunity for SMU students to show off what they’ve been doing at the grad level and at the undergrad level,” Weyand said, “and that’s really an invaluable experience for them.”

Posters and presentations spanned more than 20 different fields from the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education & Human Development, the Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences and SMU Guildhall.

“It’s a huge motivation to present your work before people,” said Aparna Viswanath, a graduate student in engineering. Viswanath presented research on “Looking Around Corners,” research into an instrument that converts a scattering surface into computational holographic sensors.

The goal of Research Day is to foster communication about research between students in different disciplines, give students the opportunity to present their work in a professional setting, and to share the outstanding research being conducted at SMU.

The annual event is sponsored by the SMU Office of Research and Graduate Studies.

View highlights of the presentations on Facebook.

Some highlights of the research:

  • Adel Alharbi, a student of Dr. Mitchell Thornton in Lyle School’s Computer Science and Engineering presented research on a novel demographic group prediction mechanism for smart device users based upon the recognition of user gestures.
  • Ashwini Subramanian and Prasanna Rangarajan, students of Dr. Dinesh Rajan, in Lyle School’s Electrical Engineering Department, presented research about accurately measuring the physical dimensions of an object for manufacturing and logistics with an inexpensive software-based Volume Measurement System using the Texas Instruments OPT8241 3D Time-of-Flight camera, which illuminates the scene with a modulated light source, observing the reflected light and translating it to distance.
  • Gang Chen, a student of Dr. Pia Vogel in the Department of Chemistry of Dedman College, presented research on multidrug resistance in cancers associated with proteins including P-glycoprotein and looking for inhibitors of P-gp.
  • Tetiana Hutchison, a student of Dr. Rob Harrod in the Chemistry Department of Dedman College, presented research on inhibitors of mitochondrial damage and oxidative stress related to human T-cell leukemia virus type-1, an aggressive hematological cancer for which there are no effective treatments.
  • Margarita Sala, a student of Dr. David Rosenfield and Dr. Austin Baldwin in the Psychology Department of Dedman College, presented research on how specific post-exercise affective states differ between regular and infrequent exercisers, thereby elucidating the “feeling better” phenomenon.
  • Bernard Kauffman, a Level Design student of Dr. Corey Clark in SMU Guildhall, presented research on building a user interface that allows video game players to analyze vast swaths of scientific data to help researchers find potentially useful compounds for treating cancer.

Browse the Research Day 2017 directory of presentations by department.

See the SMU Graduate Studies Facebook page for images of 2017 Research Day.

See the SMU Anthropology Department photo album of Research Day 2017 poster presentations.

According to the Fall 2016 report on Undergraduate Research, SMU provides opportunities for student research in a full variety of disciplines from the natural sciences and engineering, to social sciences, humanities and the arts. These opportunities permit students to bring their classroom knowledge to practical problems or a professional level in their chosen field of study.
Opportunities offered include both funded and curricular programs
that can be tailored according to student needs:

  • Students may pursue funded research with the assistance of a
    variety of campus research programs. Projects can be supported
    during the academic year or in the summer break, when students
    have the opportunity to focus full-time on research.
  • Students may also enroll in research courses that are offered in
    many departments that permit them to design a unique project,
    or participate in a broader project.
  • Students can take advantage of research opportunities outside
    of their major, or design interdisciplinary projects with their faculty
    mentors. The Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute supports
    such research via the Mayer Scholars.

    • View videos of previous SMU Research Day events:

    See Research Day winners from 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014.

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    KDFW Fox 4: NASA discovers seven earth-like planets relatively near

    A “major step forward” toward the goal of answering the very big question: Is there life on other worlds?

    DFW Fox 4 TV reporter Steve Eagar expressed “nerd-level” excitement about NASA’s announcement Feb. 22 of the discovery of seven new Earth-like planets. Eagar interviewed SMU professor Robert Kehoe, who leads the SMU astronomy team from the Department of Physics.

    NASA announced that the Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in an area called the habitable zone, where liquid water is most likely to exist on a rocky planet.

    “This is a surprising jump in our ability to understand earth like planets,” Kehoe told Eagar.

    Kehoe and the SMU astronomy team recently reported discovery of a rare star as big — or bigger — than the Earth’s sun that is expanding and contracting in a unique pattern in three different directions.

    The star is one that pulsates and so is characterized by varying brightness over time. It’s situated 7,000 light years away from the Earth in the constellation Pegasus. Called a variable star, this particular star is one of only seven known stars of its kind in our Milky Way galaxy.

    Watch the video interview on Fox 4.

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    Astronomy: High school students identify an ultra-rare star

    This newly-discovered variable is one of only seven of its kind known in our galaxy.

    Science journalist Alison Klesman with the online science news magazine Astronomy covered the discovery of a variable star by SMU professor Robert Kehoe and the astronomy team in the SMU Department of Physics.

    A high school student in an SMU summer astronomy program made the initial discovery upon culling through archived star observation data recorded by the small but powerful ROTSE-I telescope formerly at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

    Other authors on the study were SMU research astronomer Farley Ferrante, a member of the team, Plano Senior High School student Derek Horning, who first discovered the object in the ROTSE-I data, and Eric Guzman, a physics graduate from the University of Texas at Dallas who is entering SMU’s graduate program and who identified the star as pulsating.

    The newest delta Scuti (SKOO-tee) star in our night sky is so rare it’s only one of seven identified by astronomers in the Milky Way. Discovered at SMU, the star — like our sun — is in the throes of stellar evolution, to conclude as a dying ember in millions of years. Until then, the exceptional star pulsates brightly, expanding and contracting from heating and cooling of hydrogen burning at its core.

    The Astronomy article, “High school students identify an ultra-rare star,” published Feb. 15, 2017.

    Read the full story.

    EXCERPT:

    By Alison Klesman
    Astronomy
    The stars shining in the night sky might seem steady and reliable, but in truth, they are constantly changing and evolving. Out of the 100 billion or so stars that inhabit the Milky Way, a little more than 400,900 are classified as variable, meaning they change in brightness over time.

    Of those hundreds of thousands of variables catalogued in our galaxy, however, only seven belong to a class called Triple Mode high amplitude delta Scuti, or HADS(B), stars — and that seventh was just recently discovered by a high school student during a summer astronomy program at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

    The star, roughly the size of our Sun or possibly larger, is about 7,000 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. It currently has only a catalog name: ROTSE1 J232056.45+345150.9. The name comes in part from the telescope used to discover it, the ROTSE-I telescope at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

    While examining data from the telescope taken in September of 2000, Plano Senior High School student Derek Hornung noticed the star’s strange light curve, which shows the star’s brightness over time. A non-variable star’s light curve is simply a straight line, unchanging as the hours, days, and months go by. But a variable star exhibits periodic changes in brightness over the course of hours or days, creating a recognizable repeating pattern. Variable stars are classified by the patterns their light curves make, and named after the first star of each type discovered. Delta Scuti variables are thus named after the star delta Scuti.

    But there’s more to this story, still. The star is not only a delta Scuti variable, of which there are thousands known, but it is also a rare type within the delta Scuti class, a HADS(B) star. HADS(B) stars show asymmetric light curves that change brightness quickly over time. These stars are pulsating in two modes, which means the star is expanding in two directions at once. There are only 114 HADS(B) stars currently known. Rarer still are Triple Mode HADS(B) stars, of which there were only six previously identified in the Milky way. Triple Mode HADS(B) stars pulsate in not two, but three directions at once. For ROTSE1 J232056.45+345150.9, this process repeats itself every 2.5 hours.

    Read the full story.

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    New delta Scuti: Rare pulsating star 7,000 light years away is 1 of only 7 in Milky Way

    A star — as big as or bigger than our sun — in the Pegasus constellation is expanding and contracting in three different directions simultaneously on a scale of once every 2.5 hours, the result of heating and cooling of hydrogen fuel burning 28 million degrees Fahrenheit at its core

    The newest delta Scuti (SKOO-tee) star in our night sky is so rare it’s only one of seven identified by astronomers in the Milky Way. Discovered at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the star — like our sun — is in the throes of stellar evolution, to conclude as a dying ember in millions of years. Until then, the exceptional star pulsates brightly, expanding and contracting from heating and cooling of hydrogen burning at its core.

    Astronomers are reporting a rare star as big — or bigger — than the Earth’s sun that is expanding and contracting in a unique pattern in three different directions.

    The star is one that pulsates and so is characterized by varying brightness over time. It’s situated 7,000 light years away from the Earth in the constellation Pegasus, said astronomer Farley Ferrante, a member of the team that made the discovery at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

    Called a variable star, this particular star is one of only seven known stars of its kind in our Milky Way galaxy.

    “It was challenging to identify it,” Ferrante said. “This is the first time we’d encountered this rare type.”

    The Milky Way has more than 100 billion stars. But just over 400,900 are catalogued as variable stars. Of those, a mere seven — including the one identified at SMU — are the rare intrinsic variable star called a Triple Mode ‘high amplitude delta Scuti’ (pronounced SKOO-tee) or Triple Mode HADS(B), for short.

    “The discovery of this object helps to flesh out the characteristics of this unique type of variable star. These and further measurements can be used to probe the way the pulsations happen,” said SMU’s Robert Kehoe, a professor in the Department of Physics who leads the SMU astronomy team. “Pulsating stars have also been important to improving our understanding of the expansion of the universe and its origins, which is another exciting piece of this puzzle.”

    The star doesn’t yet have a common name, only an official designation based on the telescope that recorded it and its celestial coordinates. The star can be observed through a telescope, but identifying it was much more complicated.

    A high school student in an SMU summer astronomy program made the initial discovery upon culling through archived star observation data recorded by the small but powerful ROTSE-I telescope formerly at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

    Upon verification, the star was logged into the International Variable Star Index as ROTSE1 J232056.45+345150.9 by the American Association of Variable Star Observers at this link.

    How in the universe was it discovered?
    SMU’s astrophysicists discovered the variable star by analyzing light curve shape, a key identifier of star type. Light curves were created from archived data procured by ROTSE-I during multiple nights in September 2000. The telescope generates images of optical light from electrical signals based on the intensity of the source. Data representing light intensity versus time is plotted on a scale to create the light curves.

    Plano Senior High School student Derek Hornung first discovered the object in the ROTSE-I data and prepared the initial light curves. From the light curves, the astronomers knew they had something special.

    It became even more challenging to determine the specific kind of variable star. Then Eric Guzman, a physics graduate from the University of Texas at Dallas, who is entering SMU’s graduate program, solved the puzzle, identifying the star as pulsating.

    “Light curve patterns are well established, and these standard shapes correspond to different types of stars,” Ferrante said. “In a particular field of the night sky under observation there may have been hundreds or even thousands of stars. So the software we use generates a light curve for each one, for one night. Then — and here’s the human part — we use our brain’s capacity for pattern recognition to find something that looks interesting and that has a variation. This allows the initial variable star candidate to be identified. From there, you look at data from several other nights. We combine all of those into one plot, as well as add data sets from other telescopes, and that’s the evidence for discerning what kind of variable star it is.”

    That was accomplished conclusively during the referee process with the Variable Star Index moderator.

    The work to discover and analyze this rare variable star was carried out in conjunction with analyses by eight other high school students and two other undergraduates working on other variable candidates. The high school students were supported by SMU’s chapter of the Department of Energy/National Science Foundation QuarkNet program.

    Heating and cooling, expanding and contracting
    Of the stars that vary in brightness intrinsically, a large number exhibit amazingly regular oscillations in their brightness which is a sign of some pulsation phenomenon in the star, Ferrante said.

    Pulsation results from expanding and contracting as the star ages and exhausts the hydrogen fuel at its core. As the hydrogen fuel burns hotter, the star expands, then cools, then gravity shrinks it back, and contraction heats it back up.

    “I’m speaking very generally, because there’s a lot of nuance, but there’s this continual struggle between thermal expansion and gravitational contraction,” Ferrante said. “The star oscillates like a spring, but it always overshoots its equilibrium, doing that for many millions of years until it evolves into the next phase, where it burns helium in its core. And if it’s about the size and mass of the sun — then helium fusion and carbon is the end stage. And when helium is used up, we’re left with a dying ember called a white dwarf.”

    Within the pulsating category is a class of stars called delta Scuti, of which there are thousands. They are named for a prototype star whose characteristic features — including short periods of pulsating on the scale of a few hours — are typical of the entire class.

    Within delta Scuti is a subtype of which hundreds have been identified, called high amplitude delta Scuti, or HADS. Their brightness varies to a particularly large degree, registering more than 10 percent difference between their minimum and maximum brightness, indicating larger pulsations.

    Common delta Scuti pulsate along the radius in a uniform contraction like blowing up a balloon. A smaller sub-category are the HADS, which show asymmetrical-like pulsating curves.

    Within HADS, there’s the relatively rare subtype called HADS(B) , of which there are only 114 identified.

    Star evolution — just a matter of time
    A HADS(B) is distinguished by its two modes of oscillation — different parts of the star expanding at different rates in different directions but the ratio of those two periods is always the same.

    For the SMU star, two modes of oscillation weren’t immediately obvious in its light curve.

    “But we knew there was something going on because the light curve didn’t quite match known light curves of other delta Scuti’s and HADS’ objects we had studied. The light curves — when laid on top of each other — presented an asymmetry,” Ferrante said. “Ultimately the HADS(B) we discovered is even more unique than that though — it’s a Triple Mode HADS(B) and there were previously only six identified in the Milky Way. So it has three modes of oscillation, all three with a distinct period, overlapping, and happening simultaneously.”

    So rare, in fact, there’s no name yet for this new category nor a separate registry designation for it. Guzman, the student researcher who analyzed and categorized the object, recalled how the mystery unfolded.

    “When I began the analysis of the object, we had an initial idea of what type it could be,” Guzman said. “My task was to take the data and try to confirm the type by finding a second period that matched a known constant period ratio. After successfully finding the second mode, I noticed a third signal. After checking the results, I discovered the third signal coincided with what is predicted of a third pulsation mode.”

    The SMU Triple Mode HADS(B) oscillates on a scale of 2.5 hours, so it will expand and contract 10 times in one Earth day. It and the other known six HADS(B)’s are in the same general region of the Milky Way galaxy, within a few thousand light years of one another.

    “I’m sure there are more out there,” Ferrante said, “but they’re still rare, a small fraction.”

    Red giant the final phase of star’s evolution
    SMU’s Triple Mode HADS(B) is unstable and further along in its stellar evolution than our sun, which is about middle-aged and whose pulsating variations occur over a much longer period of time. SMU’s Triple Mode HADS(B) core temperature, heated from the burning of hydrogen fuel, is about 15 million Kelvin or 28 million degrees Fahrenheit.

    Someday, millions of years from now, SMU’s Triple Mode HADS(B) will deplete the hydrogen fuel at its core, and expand into a red giant.

    “Our sun might eventually experience this as well,” Ferrante said. “But Earth will be inhospitable long before then. We won’t be here to see it.”

    Funding was through the Texas Space Grant Consortium, an affiliate of NASA; SMU Dedman College. Department of Energy/National Science Foundation QuarkNet program.

    ROTSE-I began operating in late 1997, surveying the sky all night, every clear night of the year for three years. It was decommissioned in 2001 and replaced by ROTSE-III. SMU owns the ROTSE-IIIb telescope at McDonald Observatory, Fort Davis, Texas.

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    APS Physics: Viewpoint — Dark Matter Still at Large

    “No dark matter particles have been observed by two of the world’s most sensitive direct-detection experiments, casting doubt on a favored dark matter model.” — Jodi Cooley

    SMU physicist Jodi Cooley, an associate professor in the Department of Physics, writes in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters about the hunt by physicists worldwide for dark matter — the most elusive and abundant matter in our Universe.

    Cooley is an expert in dark matter and a lead researcher on one of the key dark matter experiments in the world.

    Cooley’s APS Physics article, “Viewpoint: Dark Matter Still at Large,” published Jan. 11, 2017.

    The journal is that of the American Physical Society, a non-profit membership organization advancing knowledge of physics through its research journals, scientific meetings, education, outreach, advocacy and international activities. APS represents more than 53,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry in the United States and throughout the world.

    Cooley’s current research interest is to improve our understanding of the universe by deciphering the nature of dark matter. The existence of dark matter was first postulated nearly 80 years ago. However, it wasn’t until the last decade that the revolution in precision cosmology revealed conclusively that about a quarter of our universe consisted of dark matter. Cooley and her colleagues operate sophisticated detectors in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota. These detectors can distinguish between elusive dark matter particles and background particles that mimic dark matter interactions.

    She received a B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics and Physics from the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in 1997. She earned her Masters in 2000 and her Ph.D. in 2003 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her research searching for neutrinos from diffuse astronomical sources with the AMANDA-II detector. Upon graduation she did postdoctoral studies at both MIT and Stanford University.

    Cooley is a Principal Investigator on the SuperCDMS dark matter experiment and a Principal Investigator for the AARM collaboration, which aims to develop integrative tools for underground science. She has won numerous awards for her research including an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation and the Ralph E. Powe Jr. Faculty Enhancement Award from the Oak Ridge Associated Universities.

    She was named December 2012 Woman Physicist of the Month by the American Physical Societies Committee on the Status of Women and earned a 2012 HOPE (Honoring our Professor’s Excellence) by SMU. In 2015 she received the Rotunda Outstanding Professor Award.

    Read the full article.

    EXCERPT:

    By Jodi Cooley
    Southern Methodist University
    Over 80 years ago astronomers and astrophysicists began to inventory the amount of matter in the Universe. In doing so, they stumbled into an incredible discovery: the motion of stars within galaxies, and of galaxies within galaxy clusters, could not be explained by the gravitational tug of visible matter alone [1]. So to rectify the situation, they suggested the presence of a large amount of invisible, or “dark,” matter. We now know that dark matter makes up 84% of the matter in the Universe [2], but its composition—the type of particle or particles it’s made from—remains a mystery. Researchers have pursued a myriad of theoretical candidates, but none of these “suspects” have been apprehended. The lack of detection has helped better define the parameters, such as masses and interaction strengths, that could characterize the particles. For the most compelling dark matter candidate, WIMPs, the viable parameter space has recently become smaller with the announcement in September 2016 by the PandaX-II Collaboration [3] and now by the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) Collaboration [4] that a search for the particles has come up empty.

    Since physicists don’t know what dark matter is, they need a diverse portfolio of instruments and approaches to detect it. One technique is to try to make dark matter in an accelerator, such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and then to look for its decay products with a particle detector. A second technique is to use instruments such as the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to observe dark matter interactions in and beyond our Galaxy. This approach is called “indirect detection” because what the telescope actually observes is the particles produced by a collision between dark matter particles. In the same way that forensic scientists rely on physical evidence to reverse-engineer a crime with no witnesses, scientists use the aftermath of these collisions to reconstruct the identities of the initial dark matter particles.

    The third technique, and the one used in both the LUX and PandaX-II experiments, is known as “direct detection.” Here, a detector is constructed on Earth with a massive target to increase the odds of an interaction with the dark matter that exists in our Galaxy. In the case of LUX and PandaX-II, the dark matter particles leave behind traces of light that can be detected with sophisticated sensors. This is akin to having placed cameras at the scene of a crime, capturing the culprit in the act.

    Read the full article.

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    SMU physicists: CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is once again smashing protons, taking data

    CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its experiments are back in action, now taking physics data for 2016 to get an improved understanding of fundamental physics.

    Following its annual winter break, the most powerful collider in the world has been switched back on.

    Geneva-based CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — an accelerator complex and its experiments — has been fine-tuned using low-intensity beams and pilot proton collisions, and now the LHC and the experiments are ready to take an abundance of data.

    The goal is to improve our understanding of fundamental physics, which ultimately in decades to come can drive innovation and inventions by researchers in other fields.

    Scientists from SMU’s Department of Physics are among the several thousand physicists worldwide who contribute on the LHC research.

    “All of us here hope that some of the early hints will be confirmed and an unexpected physics phenomenon will show up,” said Ryszard Stroynowski, SMU professor and a principal investigator on the LHC. “If something new does appear, we will try to contribute to the understanding of what it may be.”

    SMU physicists work on the LHC’s ATLAS experiment. Run 1 of the Large Hadron Collider made headlines in 2012 when scientists observed in the data a new fundamental particle, the Higgs boson. The collider was then paused for an extensive upgrade and came back much more powerful than before. As part of Run 2, physicists on the Large Hadron Collider’s experiments are analyzing new proton collision data to unravel the structure of the Higgs.

    The Higgs was the last piece of the puzzle for the Standard Model — a theory that offers the best description of the known fundamental particles and the forces that govern them. In 2016 the ATLAS and CMS collaborations of the LHC will study this boson in depth.

    Over the next three to four months there is a need to verify the measurements of the Higgs properties taken in 2015 at lower energies with less data, Stroynowski said.

    “We also must check all hints of possible deviations from the Standard Model seen in the earlier data — whether they were real effects or just statistical fluctuations,” he said. “In the long term, over the next one to two years, we’ll pursue studies of the Higgs decays to heavy b quarks leading to the understanding of how one Higgs particle interacts with other Higgs particles.”

    In addition, the connection between the Higgs Boson and the bottom quark is an important relationship that is well-described in the Standard Model but poorly understood by experiments, said Stephen Sekula, SMU associate professor. The SMU ATLAS group will continue work started last year to study the connection, Sekula said.

    “We will be focused on measuring this relationship in both Standard Model and Beyond-the-Standard Model contexts,” he said.

    SMU physicists also study Higgs-boson interactions with the most massive known particle, the top-quark, said Robert Kehoe, SMU associate professor.

    “This interaction is also not well-understood,” Kehoe said. “Our group continues to focus on the first direct measurement of the strength of this interaction, which may reveal whether the Higgs mechanism of the Standard Model is truly fundamental.”

    All those measurements are key goals in the ATLAS Run 2 and beyond physics program, Sekula said. In addition, none of the ultimate physics goals can be achieved without faultless operation of the complex ATLAS detector, its software and data acquisition system.

    “The SMU group maintains work on operations, improvements and maintenance of two components of ATLAS — the Liquid Argon Calorimeter and data acquisition trigger,” Stroynowski said.

    Intensity of the beam to increase, supplying six times more proton collisions
    Following a short commissioning period, the LHC operators will now increase the intensity of the beams so that the machine produces a larger number of collisions.

    “The LHC is running extremely well,” said CERN Director for Accelerators and Technology, Frédérick Bordry. “We now have an ambitious goal for 2016, as we plan to deliver around six times more data than in 2015.”

    The LHC’s collisions produce subatomic fireballs of energy, which morph into the fundamental building blocks of matter. The four particle detectors located on the LHC’s ring allow scientists to record and study the properties of these building blocks and look for new fundamental particles and forces.

    This is the second year the LHC will run at a collision energy of 13 TeV. During the first phase of Run 2 in 2015, operators mastered steering the accelerator at this new higher energy by gradually increasing the intensity of the beams.

    “The restart of the LHC always brings with it great emotion”, said Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director General. “With the 2016 data the experiments will be able to perform improved measurements of the Higgs boson and other known particles and phenomena, and look for new physics with an increased discovery potential.”

    New exploration can begin at higher energy, with much more data
    Beams are made of “trains” of bunches, each containing around 100 billion protons, moving at almost the speed of light around the 27-kilometre ring of the LHC. These bunch trains circulate in opposite directions and cross each other at the center of experiments. Last year, operators increased the number of proton bunches up to 2,244 per beam, spaced at intervals of 25 nanoseconds. These enabled the ATLAS and CMS collaborations to study data from about 400 million million proton–proton collisions. In 2016 operators will increase the number of particles circulating in the machine and the squeezing of the beams in the collision regions. The LHC will generate up to 1 billion collisions per second in the experiments.

    “In 2015 we opened the doors to a completely new landscape with unprecedented energy. Now we can begin to explore this landscape in depth,” said CERN Director for Research and Computing Eckhard Elsen.

    Between 2010 and 2013 the LHC produced proton-proton collisions with 8 Tera-electronvolts of energy. In the spring of 2015, after a two-year shutdown, LHC operators ramped up the collision energy to 13 TeV. This increase in energy enables scientists to explore a new realm of physics that was previously inaccessible. Run II collisions also produce Higgs bosons — the groundbreaking particle discovered in LHC Run I — 25 percent faster than Run I collisions and increase the chances of finding new massive particles by more than 40 percent.

    But there are still several questions that remain unanswered by the Standard Model, such as why nature prefers matter to antimatter, and what dark matter consists of, despite it potentially making up one quarter of our universe.

    The huge amounts of data from the 2016 LHC run will enable physicists to challenge these and many other questions, to probe the Standard Model further and to possibly find clues about the physics that lies beyond it.

    The physics run with protons will last six months. The machine will then be set up for a four-week run colliding protons with lead ions.

    “We’re proud to support more than a thousand U.S. scientists and engineers who play integral parts in operating the detectors, analyzing the data, and developing tools and technologies to upgrade the LHC’s performance in this international endeavor,” said Jim Siegrist, Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. “The LHC is the only place in the world where this kind of research can be performed, and we are a fully committed partner on the LHC experiments and the future development of the collider itself.”

    The four largest LHC experimental collaborations, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb, now start to collect and analyze the 2016 data. Their broad physics program will be complemented by the measurements of three smaller experiments — TOTEM, LHCf and MoEDAL — which focus with enhanced sensitivity on specific features of proton collisions. — SMU, CERN and Fermilab

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    Nearby massive star explosion 30 million years ago equaled brightness of 100 million suns

    Analysis of exploding star’s light curve and color spectrum reveal spectacular demise of one of the closest supernova to Earth in recent years; its parent star was so big it’s radius was 200 times larger than our sun

    A giant star that exploded 30 million years ago in a galaxy near Earth had a radius prior to going supernova that was 200 times larger than our sun, according to astrophysicists at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

    The sudden blast hurled material outward from the star at a speed of 10,000 kilometers a second. That’s equivalent to 36 million kilometers an hour or 22.4 million miles an hour, said SMU physicist Govinda Dhungana, lead author on the new analysis.

    The comprehensive analysis of the exploding star’s light curve and color spectrum have revealed new information about the existence and sudden death of supernovae in general, many aspects of which have long baffled scientists.

    “There are so many characteristics we can derive from the early data,” Dhungana said. “This was a big massive star, burning tremendous fuel. When it finally reached a point its core couldn’t support the gravitational pull inward, suddenly it collapsed and then exploded.”

    The massive explosion was one of the closest to Earth in recent years, visible as a point of light in the night sky starting July 24, 2013, said Robert Kehoe, SMU physics professor, who leads SMU’s astrophysics team.

    The explosion, termed by astronomers Supernova 2013ej, in a galaxy near our Milky Way was equal in energy output to the simultaneous brightness of 100 million of the Earth’s suns.

    The star was one of billions in the spiral galaxy M74 in the constellation Pisces.

    Considered close by supernova standards, SN 2013ej was in fact so far away that light from the explosion took 30 million years to reach Earth. At that distance, even such a large explosion was only visible by telescopes.

    Dhungana and colleagues were able to explore SN 2013ej via a rare collection of extensive data from seven ground-based telescopes and NASA’s Swift satellite.

    The data span a time period prior to appearance of the supernova in July 2013 until more than 450 days after.

    The team measured the supernova’s evolving temperature, its mass, its radius, the abundance of a variety of chemical elements in its explosion and debris and its distance from Earth. They also estimated the time of the shock breakout, the bright flash from the shockwave of the explosion.

    The star’s original mass was about 15 times that of our sun, Dhungana said. Its temperature was a hot 12,000 Kelvin (approximately 22,000 degrees Fahrenheit) on the tenth day after the explosion, steadily cooling until it reached 4,500 Kelvin after 50 days. The sun’s surface is 5,800 Kelvin, while the Earth’s core is estimated to be about 6,000 Kelvin.

    The new measurements are published online here in the May 2016 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, “Extensive spectroscopy and photometry of the Type IIP Supernova 2013j.”

    Shedding new light on supernovae, mysterious objects of our universe
    Supernovae occur throughout the universe, but they are not fully understood. Scientists don’t directly observe the explosions but instead detect changes in emerging light as material is hurled from the exploding star in the seconds and days after the blast.

    Telescopes such as SMU’s robotic ROTSE-IIIb telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas, watch our sky and pick up the light as a point of brightening light. Others, such as the Hobby Eberly telescope, also at McDonald, observe a spectrum.

    SN 2013ej is M74’s third supernova in just 10 years. That is quite frequent compared to our Milky Way, which has had a scant one supernova observed over the past 400 years. NASA estimates that the M74 galaxy consists of 100 billion stars.

    M74 is one of only a few dozen galaxies first cataloged by the astronomer Charles Messier in the late 1700s. It has a spiral structure — also the Milky Way’s apparent shape — indicating it is still undergoing star formation, as opposed to being an elliptical galaxy in which new stars no longer form.

    It’s possible that planets were orbiting SN 2013ej’s progenitor star prior to it going supernova, in which case those objects would have been obliterated by the blast, Kehoe said.

    “If you were nearby, you wouldn’t know there was a problem beforehand, because at the surface you can’t see the core heating up and collapsing,” Kehoe said. “Then suddenly it explodes — and you’re toast.”

    Distances to nearby galaxies help determine cosmic distance ladder
    Scientists remain unsure whether supernovae leave behind a black hole or a neutron star like a giant atomic nucleus the size of a city.

    “The core collapse and how it produces the explosion is particularly tricky,” Kehoe said. “Part of what makes SN 2013ej so interesting is that astronomers are able to compare a variety of models to better understand what is happening. Using some of this information, we are also able to calculate the distance to this object. This allows us a new type of object with which to study the larger universe, and maybe someday dark energy.”

    Being 30 million light years away, SN 2013ej was a relatively nearby extragalactic event, according to Jozsef Vinko, astrophysicist at Konkoly Observatory and University of Szeged in Hungary.

    “Distances to nearby galaxies play a significant role in establishing the so-called cosmic distance ladder, where each rung is a galaxy at a known distance.”

    Vinko provided important data from telescopes at Konkoly Observatory and Hungary’s Baja Observatory and carried out distance measurement analysis on SN 2013ej.

    “Nearby supernovae are especially important,” Vinko said. “Paradoxically, we know the distances to the nearest galaxies less certainly than to the more distant ones. In this particular case we were able to combine the extensive datasets of SN 2013ej with those of another supernova, SN 2002ap, both of which occurred in M74, to suppress the uncertainty of their common distance derived from those data.”

    Supernova spectrum analysis is like taking a core sample
    While stars appear to be static objects that exist indefinitely, in reality they are primarily a burning ball, fueled by the fusion of elements, including hydrogen and helium into heavier elements. As they exhaust lighter elements, they must contract in the core and heat up to burn heavier elements. Over time, they fuse the various chemical elements of the periodic table, proceeding from lightest to heaviest. Initially they fuse helium into carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Those elements then fuel the fusion of progressively heavier elements such as sulfur, argon, chlorine and potassium.

    “Studying the spectrum of a supernova over time is like taking a core sample,” Kehoe said. “The calcium in our bones, for example, was cooked in a star. A star’s nuclear fusion is always forging heavier and heavier elements. At the beginning of the universe there was only hydrogen and helium. The other elements were made in stars and in supernovae. The last product to get created is iron, which is an element that is so heavy it can’t be burned as fuel.”

    Dhungana’s spectrum analysis of SN 2013ej revealed many elements, including hydrogen, helium, calcium, titanium, barium, sodium and iron.

    “When we have as many spectra as we have for this supernova at different times,” Kehoe added, “we are able to look deeper and deeper into the original star, sort of like an X-ray or a CAT scan.”

    SN 2013ej’s short-lived existence was just tens of millions of years
    Analysis of SN 2013ej’s spectrum from ultraviolet through infrared indicates light from the explosion reached Earth July 23, 2013. It was discovered July 25, 2013 by the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope at California’s Lick Observatory. A look back at images captured by SMU’s ROTSE-IIIb showed that SMU’s robotic telescope detected the supernova several hours earlier, Dhungana said.

    “These observations were able to show a rapidly brightening supernova that started just 20 hours beforehand,” he said. “The start of the supernova, termed ‘shock breakout,’ corresponds to the moment when the internal explosion crashes through the star’s outer layers.”

    Like many others, SN 2013ej was a Type II supernova. That is a massive star still undergoing nuclear fusion. Once iron is fused, the fuel runs out, causing the core to collapse. Within a quarter second the star explodes.

    Supernovae have death and birth written all over them
    Massive stars typically have a shorter life span than smaller ones.

    “SN 2013ej probably lived tens of millions of years,” Kehoe said. “In universe time, that’s the blink of an eye. It’s not very long-lived at all compared to our sun, which will live billions of years. Even though these stars are bigger and have a lot more fuel, they burn it really fast, so they just get hotter and hotter until they just gobble up the matter and burn it.”

    For most of its brief life, SN 2013ej would probably have burned hydrogen, which then fused to helium, burning for a few hundred thousand years, then perhaps carbon and oxygen for a few hundred days, calcium for a few months and silicon for several days.

    “Supernovae have death and birth written all over them,” Kehoe said. “Not only do they create the elements we are made of, but the shockwave that goes out from the explosion — that’s where our solar system comes from.”

    Outflowing material slams into clouds of material in interstellar space, causing it to collapse and form a solar system.

    “The heavy elements made in the supernova and its parent star are those which comprise the bulk of terrestrial planets, like Earth, and are necessary for life,” Kehoe said.

    Besides physicists in the SMU Department of Physics, researchers on the project also included scientists from the University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary; the University of Texas, Austin, Texas; Konkoly Observatory, Budapest, Hungary; and the University of California, Berkeley, Calif. — Margaret Allen

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    SMU 2015 research efforts broadly noted in a variety of ways for world-changing impact

    SMU scientists and their research have a global reach that is frequently noted, beyond peer publications and media mentions.

    By Margaret Allen
    SMU News & Communications
    It was a good year for SMU faculty and student research efforts. Here is a small sampling of public and published acknowledgements during 2015:

    Simmons, Diego Roman, SMU, education

    Hot topic merits open access
    Taylor & Francis, publisher of the online journal Environmental Education Research, lifted its subscription-only requirement to meet demand for an article on how climate change is taught to middle-schoolers in California.

    Co-author of the research was Diego Román, assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development.

    Román’s research revealed that California textbooks are teaching sixth graders that climate change is a controversial debate stemming from differing opinions, rather than a scientific conclusion based on rigorous scientific evidence.

    The article, “Textbooks of doubt: Using systemic functional analysis to explore the framing of climate change in middle-school science textbooks,” published in September. The finding generated such strong interest that Taylor & Francis opened access to the article.

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    Research makes the cover of Biochemistry
    Drugs important in the battle against cancer were tested in a virtual lab by SMU biology professors to see how they would behave in the human cell.

    A computer-generated composite image of the simulation made the Dec. 15 cover of the journal Biochemistry.

    Scientific articles about discoveries from the simulation were also published in the peer review journals Biochemistry and in Pharmacology Research & Perspectives.

    The researchers tested the drugs by simulating their interaction in a computer-generated model of one of the cell’s key molecular pumps — the protein P-glycoprotein, or P-gp. Outcomes of interest were then tested in the Wise-Vogel wet lab.

    The ongoing research is the work of biochemists John Wise, associate professor, and Pia Vogel, professor and director of the SMU Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery in Dedman College. Assisting them were a team of SMU graduate and undergraduate students.

    The researchers developed the model to overcome the problem of relying on traditional static images for the structure of P-gp. The simulation makes it possible for researchers to dock nearly any drug in the protein and see how it behaves, then test those of interest in an actual lab.

    To date, the researchers have run millions of compounds through the pump and have discovered some that are promising for development into pharmaceutical drugs to battle cancer.

    Click here to read more about the research.

    SMU, Simpson Rowe, sexual assault, video

    Strong interest in research on sexual victimization
    Teen girls were less likely to report being sexually victimized after learning to assertively resist unwanted sexual overtures and after practicing resistance in a realistic virtual environment, according to three professors from the SMU Department of Psychology.

    The finding was reported in Behavior Therapy. The article was one of the psychology journal’s most heavily shared and mentioned articles across social media, blogs and news outlets during 2015, the publisher announced.

    The study was the work of Dedman College faculty Lorelei Simpson Rowe, associate professor and Psychology Department graduate program co-director; Ernest Jouriles, professor; and Renee McDonald, SMU associate dean for research and academic affairs.

    The journal’s publisher, Elsevier, temporarily has lifted its subscription requirement on the article, “Reducing Sexual Victimization Among Adolescent Girls: A Randomized Controlled Pilot Trial of My Voice, My Choice,” and has opened it to free access for three months.

    Click here to read more about the research.

    Consumers assume bigger price equals better quality
    Even when competing firms can credibly disclose the positive attributes of their products to buyers, they may not do so.

    Instead, they find it more lucrative to “signal” quality through the prices they charge, typically working on the assumption that shoppers think a high price indicates high quality. The resulting high prices hurt buyers, and may create a case for mandatory disclosure of quality through public policy.

    That was a finding of the research of Dedman College’s Santanu Roy, professor, Department of Economics. Roy’s article about the research was published in February in one of the blue-ribbon journals, and the oldest, in the field, The Economic Journal.

    Published by the U.K.’s Royal Economic Society, The Economic Journal is one of the founding journals of modern economics. The journal issued a media briefing about the paper, “Competition, Disclosure and Signaling,” typically reserved for academic papers of broad public interest.

    The Journal of Physical Chemistry A

    Chemistry research group edits special issue
    Chemistry professors Dieter Cremer and Elfi Kraka, who lead SMU’s Computational and Theoretical Chemistry Group, were guest editors of a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Physical Chemistry. The issue published in March.

    The Computational and Theoretical research group, called CATCO for short, is a union of computational and theoretical chemistry scientists at SMU. Their focus is research in computational chemistry, educating and training graduate and undergraduate students, disseminating and explaining results of their research to the broader public, and programming computers for the calculation of molecules and molecular aggregates.

    The special issue of Physical Chemistry included 40 contributions from participants of a four-day conference in Dallas in March 2014 that was hosted by CATCO. The 25th Austin Symposium drew 108 participants from 22 different countries who, combined, presented eight plenary talks, 60 lectures and about 40 posters.

    CATCO presented its research with contributions from Cremer and Kraka, as well as Marek Freindorf, research assistant professor; Wenli Zou, visiting professor; Robert Kalescky, post-doctoral fellow; and graduate students Alan Humason, Thomas Sexton, Dani Setlawan and Vytor Oliveira.

    There have been more than 75 graduate students and research associates working in the CATCO group, which originally was formed at the University of Cologne, Germany, before moving to SMU in 2009.

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    Vertebrate paleontology recognized with proclamation
    Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings proclaimed Oct. 11-17, 2015 Vertebrate Paleontology week in Dallas on behalf of the Dallas City Council.

    The proclamation honored the 75th Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, which was jointly hosted by SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences in Dedman College and the Perot Museum of Science and Nature. The conference drew to Dallas some 1,200 scientists from around the world.

    Making research presentations or presenting research posters were: faculty members Bonnie Jacobs, Louis Jacobs, Michael Polcyn, Neil Tabor and Dale Winkler; adjunct research assistant professor Alisa Winkler; research staff member Kurt Ferguson; post-doctoral researchers T. Scott Myers and Lauren Michael; and graduate students Matthew Clemens, John Graf, Gary Johnson and Kate Andrzejewski.

    The host committee co-chairs were Anthony Fiorillo, adjunct research professor; and Louis Jacobs, professor. Committee members included Polcyn; Christopher Strganac, graduate student; Diana Vineyard, research associate; and research professor Dale Winkler.

    KERA radio reporter Kat Chow filed a report from the conference, explaining to listeners the science of vertebrate paleontology, which exposes the past, present and future of life on earth by studying fossils of animals that had backbones.

    SMU earthquake scientists rock scientific journal

    Modelled pressure changes caused by injection and production. (Nature Communications/SMU)
    Modelled pressure changes caused by injection and production. (Nature Communications/SMU)

    Findings by the SMU earthquake team reverberated across the nation with publication of their scientific article in the prestigious British interdisciplinary journal Nature, ranked as one of the world’s most cited scientific journals.

    The article reported that the SMU-led seismology team found that high volumes of wastewater injection combined with saltwater extraction from natural gas wells is the most likely cause of unusually frequent earthquakes occurring in the Dallas-Fort Worth area near the small community of Azle.

    The research was the work of Dedman College faculty Matthew Hornbach, associate professor of geophysics; Heather DeShon, associate professor of geophysics; Brian Stump, SMU Albritton Chair in Earth Sciences; Chris Hayward, research staff and director geophysics research program; and Beatrice Magnani, associate professor of geophysics.

    The article, “Causal factors for seismicity near Azle, Texas,” published online in late April. Already the article has been downloaded nearly 6,000 times, and heavily shared on both social and conventional media. The article has achieved a ranking of 270, which puts it in the 99th percentile of 144,972 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals, and 98th percentile of 626 tracked articles of a similar age in Nature.

    “It has a very high impact factor for an article of its age,” said Robert Gregory, professor and chair, SMU Earth Sciences Department.

    The scientific article also was entered into the record for public hearings both at the Texas Railroad Commission and the Texas House Subcommittee on Seismic Activity.

    Researchers settle long-debated heritage question of “The Ancient One”

    The skull of Kennewick Man and a sculpted bust by StudioEIS based on forensic facial reconstruction by sculptor Amanda Danning. (Credit: Brittany Tatchell)
    The skull of Kennewick Man and a sculpted bust by StudioEIS based on forensic facial reconstruction by sculptor Amanda Danning. (Credit: Brittany Tatchell)

    The research of Dedman College anthropologist and Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory David Meltzer played a role in settling the long-debated and highly controversial heritage of “Kennewick Man.”

    Also known as “The Ancient One,” the 8,400-year-old male skeleton discovered in Washington state has been the subject of debate for nearly two decades. Argument over his ancestry has gained him notoriety in high-profile newspaper and magazine articles, as well as making him the subject of intense scholarly study.

    Officially the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Kennewick Man was discovered in 1996 and radiocarbon dated to 8500 years ago.

    Because of his cranial shape and size he was declared not Native American but instead ‘Caucasoid,’ implying a very different population had once been in the Americas, one that was unrelated to contemporary Native Americans.

    But Native Americans long have claimed Kennewick Man as theirs and had asked for repatriation of his remains for burial according to their customs.

    Meltzer, collaborating with his geneticist colleague Eske Willerslev and his team at the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, in June reported the results of their analysis of the DNA of Kennewick in the prestigious British journal Nature in the scientific paper “The ancestry and affiliations of Kennewick Man.”

    The results were announced at a news conference, settling the question based on first-ever DNA evidence: Kennewick Man is Native American.

    The announcement garnered national and international media attention, and propelled a new push to return the skeleton to a coalition of Columbia Basin tribes. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) introduced the Bring the Ancient One Home Act of 2015 and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has offered state assistance for returning the remains to Native Tribes.

    Science named the Kennewick work one of its nine runners-up in the highly esteemed magazine’s annual “Breakthrough of the Year” competition.

    The research article has been viewed more than 60,000 times. It has achieved a ranking of 665, which puts it in the 99th percentile of 169,466 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals, and in the 94th percentile of 958 tracked articles of a similar age in Nature.

    In “Kennewick Man: coming to closure,” an article in the December issue of Antiquity, a journal of Cambridge University Press, Meltzer noted that the DNA merely confirmed what the tribes had known all along: “We are him, he is us,” said one tribal spokesman. Meltzer concludes: “We presented the DNA evidence. The tribal members gave it meaning.”

    Click here to read more about the research.

    Prehistoric vacuum cleaner captures singular award

    Paleontologists Louis L. Jacobs, SMU, and Anthony Fiorillo, Perot Museum, have identified a new species of marine mammal from bones recovered from Unalaska, an Aleutian island in the North Pacific. (Hillsman Jackson, SMU)
    Paleontologists Louis L. Jacobs, SMU, and Anthony Fiorillo, Perot Museum, have identified a new species of marine mammal from bones recovered from Unalaska, an Aleutian island in the North Pacific. (Hillsman Jackson, SMU)

    Science writer Laura Geggel with Live Science named a new species of extinct marine mammal identified by two SMU paleontologists among “The 10 Strangest Animal Discoveries of 2015.”

    The new species, dubbed a prehistoric hoover by London’s Daily Mail online news site, was identified by SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, a professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, and paleontologist and SMU adjunct research professor Anthony Fiorillo, vice president of research and collections and chief curator at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science.

    Jacobs and Fiorillo co-authored a study about the identification of new fossils from the oddball creature Desmostylia, discovered in the same waters where the popular “Deadliest Catch” TV show is filmed. The hippo-like creature ate like a vacuum cleaner and is a new genus and species of the only order of marine mammals ever to go extinct — surviving a mere 23 million years.

    Desmostylians, every single species combined, lived in an interval between 33 million and 10 million years ago. Their strange columnar teeth and odd style of eating don’t occur in any other animal, Jacobs said.

    SMU campus hosted the world’s premier physicists

    The SMU Department of Physics hosted the “23rd International Workshop on Deep Inelastic Scattering and Related Subjects” from April 27-May 1, 2015. Deep Inelastic Scattering is the process of probing the quantum particles that make up our universe.

    As noted by the CERN Courier — the news magazine of the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, which hosts the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest science experiment — more than 250 scientists from 30 countries presented more than 200 talks on a multitude of subjects relevant to experimental and theoretical research. SMU physicists presented at the conference.

    The SMU organizing committee was led by Fred Olness, professor and chair of the SMU Department of Physics in Dedman College, who also gave opening and closing remarks at the conference. The committee consisted of other SMU faculty, including Jodi Cooley, associate professor; Simon Dalley, senior lecturer; Robert Kehoe, professor; Pavel Nadolsky, associate professor, who also presented progress on experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider; Randy Scalise, senior lecturer; and Stephen Sekula, associate professor.

    Sekula also organized a series of short talks for the public about physics and the big questions that face us as we try to understand our universe.

    Click here to read more about the research.

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    Energy & Matter

    Top Quark: Precise particle measurement improves subatomic tool probing mysteries of universe

    In post-Big Bang world, nature’s top quark — a key component of matter — is a highly sensitive probe that physicists use to evaluate competing theories about quantum interactions

    Physicists at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, have achieved a new precise measurement of a key subatomic particle, opening the door to better understanding some of the deepest mysteries of our universe.

    The researchers calculated the new measurement for a critical characteristic — mass — of the top quark.

    Quarks make up the protons and neutrons that comprise almost all visible matter. Physicists have known the top quark’s mass was large, but encountered great difficulty trying to clearly determine it.

    The newly calculated measurement of the top quark will help guide physicists in formulating new theories, said Robert Kehoe, a professor in SMU’s Department of Physics. Kehoe leads the SMU group that performed the measurement.

    Top quark’s mass matters ultimately because the particle is a highly sensitive probe and key tool to evaluate competing theories about the nature of matter and the fate of the universe.

    Physicists for two decades have worked to improve measurement of the top quark’s mass and narrow its value.

    “Top” bears on newest fundamental particle, the Higgs boson
    The new value from SMU confirms the validity of recent measurements by other physicists, said Kehoe.

    But it also adds growing uncertainty about aspects of physics’ Standard Model.

    The Standard Model is the collection of theories physicists have derived — and continually revise — to explain the universe and how the tiniest building blocks of our universe interact with one another. Problems with the Standard Model remain to be solved. For example, gravity has not yet been successfully integrated into the framework.

    The Standard Model holds that the top quark — known familiarly as “top” — is central in two of the four fundamental forces in our universe — the electroweak force, by which particles gain mass, and the strong force, which governs how quarks interact. The electroweak force governs common phenomena like light, electricity and magnetism. The strong force governs atomic nuclei and their structure, in addition to the particles that quarks comprise, like protons and neutrons in the nucleus.

    The top plays a role with the newest fundamental particle in physics, the Higgs boson, in seeing if the electroweak theory holds water.

    Some scientists think the top quark may be special because its mass can verify or jeopardize the electroweak theory. If jeopardized, that opens the door to what physicists refer to as “new physics” — theories about particles and our universe that go beyond the Standard Model.

    Other scientists theorize the top quark might also be key to the unification of the electromagnetic and weak interactions of protons, neutrons and quarks.

    In addition, as the only quark that can be observed directly, the top quark tests the Standard Model’s strong force theory.

    “So the top quark is really pushing both theories,” Kehoe said. “The top mass is particularly interesting because its measurement is getting to the point now where we are pushing even beyond the level that the theorists understand.”

    He added, “Our experimental errors, or uncertainties, are so small, that it really forces theorists to try hard to understand the impact of the quark’s mass. We need to observe the Higgs interacting with the top directly and we need to measure both particles more precisely.”

    The new measurement results were presented in August and September at the Third Annual Conference on Large Hadron Collider Physics, St. Petersburg, Russia, and at the 8th International Workshop on Top Quark Physics, Ischia, Italy.

    “The public perception, with discovery of the Higgs, is ‘Ok, it’s done,’” Kehoe said. “But it’s not done. This is really just the beginning and the top quark is a key tool for figuring out the missing pieces of the puzzle.”

    The results were made public by DZero, a collaborative experiment of more than 500 physicists from around the world. The measurement is described in “Precise measurement of the top quark mass in dilepton decays with optimized neutrino weighting” and is available online at arxiv.org/abs/1508.03322.

    SMU measurement achieves surprising level of precision
    To narrow the top quark measurement, SMU doctoral researcher Huanzhao Liu took a standard methodology for measuring the top quark and improved the accuracy of some parameters. He also improved calibration of an analysis of top quark data.

    “Liu achieved a surprising level of precision,” Kehoe said. “And his new method for optimizing analysis is also applicable to analyses of other particle data besides the top quark, making the methodology useful within the field of particle physics as a whole.”

    The SMU optimization could be used to more precisely understand the Higgs boson, which explains why matter has mass, said Liu.

    The Higgs was observed for the first time in 2012, and physicists keenly want to understand its nature.

    “This methodology has its advantages — including understanding Higgs interactions with other particles — and we hope that others use it,” said Liu. “With it we achieved 20-percent improvement in the measurement. Here’s how I think of it myself — everybody likes a $199 iPhone with contract. If someday Apple tells us they will reduce the price by 20 percent, how would we all feel to get the lower price?”

    Another optimization employed by Liu improved the calibration precision by four times, Kehoe said.

    Shower of Top quarks post Big Bang
    Top quarks, which rarely occur now, were much more common right after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. However, top is the only quark, of six different kinds, that can be observed directly. For that reason, experimental physicists focus on the characteristics of top quarks to better understand the quarks in everyday matter.

    To study the top, physicists generate them in particle accelerators, such as the Tevatron, a powerful U.S. Department of Energy particle accelerator operated by Fermi National Laboratory in Illinois, or the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, a project of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN.

    SMU’s measurement draws on top quark data gathered by DZero that was produced from proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron, which Fermilab shut down in 2011.

    The new measurement is the most precise of its kind from the Tevatron, and is competitive with comparable measurements from the Large Hadron Collider.

    Critical question: Universe isn’t necessarily stable at all energies
    “The ability to measure the top quark mass precisely is fortuitous because it, together with the Higgs boson mass, tells us whether the universe is stable or not,” Kehoe said. “That has emerged as one of today’s most important questions.”

    A stable universe is one in a low energy state where particles and forces interact and behave according to theoretical predictions forever. That’s in contrast to metastable, or unstable, meaning a higher energy state in which things eventually change, or change suddenly and unpredictably, and that could result in the universe collapsing. The Higgs and top quark are the two most important parameters for determining an answer to that question, Kehoe said.

    Recent measurements of the Higgs and top quark indicate they describe a universe that is not necessarily stable at all energies.

    “We want a theory — Standard Model or otherwise — that can predict physical processes at all energies,” Kehoe said. “But the measurements now are such that it looks like we may be over the border of a stable universe. We’re metastable, meaning there’s a gray area, that it’s stable in some energies, but not in others.”

    Are we facing imminent doom? Will the universe collapse?
    That disparity between theory and observation indicates the Standard Model theory has been outpaced by new measurements of the Higgs and top quark.

    “It’s going to take some work for theorists to explain this,” Kehoe said, adding it’s a challenge physicists relish, as evidenced by their preoccupation with “new physics” and the possibilities the Higgs and Top quark create.

    “I attended two conferences recently,” Kehoe said, “and there’s argument about exactly what it means, so that could be interesting.”

    So are we in trouble?

    “Not immediately,” Kehoe said. “The energies at which metastability would kick in are so high that particle interactions in our universe almost never reach that level. In any case, a metastable universe would likely not change for many billions of years.”

    Top quark — a window into other quarks
    As the only quark that can be observed, the top quark pops in and out of existence fleetingly in protons, making it possible for physicists to test and define its properties directly.

    “To me it’s like fireworks,” Liu said. “They shoot into the sky and explode into smaller pieces, and those smaller pieces continue exploding. That sort of describes how the top quark decays into other particles.”

    By measuring the particles to which the top quark decays, scientists capture a measure of the top quark, Liu explained

    But study of the top is still an exotic field, Kehoe said. “For years top quarks were treated as a construct and not a real thing. Now they are real and still fairly new — and it’s really important we understand their properties fully.” — Margaret Allen

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    Earth & Climate Energy & Matter Videos

    Fermilab experiment observes change in neutrinos from one type to another over 500 miles

    Scientists have sorted through millions of cosmic ray strikes and zeroed in on neutrino interactions in their quest to learn more about the abundant yet mysterious particles that flit through ordinary matter as though it isn’t there.

    Initial data from a new U.S.–based physics experiment indicates scientists are a step closer to understanding neutrinos, the second most abundant particle in the universe.

    Neutrinos are little understood, but indications are they hold clues to why matter overwhelmingly survived after the Big Bang instead of just energy in the form of light.

    The first data from NOvA, the experiment in northern Minnesota, indicates that NOvA’s massive particle detector — designed to observe and measure the behavior of neutrinos — is functioning as planned.

    “In the 18 or so months the experiment has been up and running we’ve analyzed about 8 percent of the data we anticipate collecting over the life of the experiment,” said physicist Thomas Coan, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

    Coan, a professor in SMU’s Department of Physics, is a principal investigator on NOvA, a collaboration of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Laboratory. “So we’re really just at the beginning. But it’s a great start, and it’s gratifying that the beginning has begun so well.”

    More than 200 scientists from the U.S. and six other countries make up the collaboration.

    Specifically, they predict that the experiment’s data will tell them the relative weight of the three different types or “flavors” of neutrinos, as well as reveal whether neutrinos and antineutrinos interact in the same way.

    Answers to those questions will add information to theories of matter’s existence and why it wasn’t annihilated during the Big Bang, Coan said.

    The completed NOvA far detector in Ash River, Minnesota, stands 50 feet tall, 50 feet wide and 200 feet long. The pivoting machine that was used to move each block of the detector into place now serves as the capstone on the end of the completed structure. Photo: Fermilab
    The completed NOvA far detector in Ash River, Minnesota, stands 50 feet tall, 50 feet wide and 200 feet long. The pivoting machine that was used to move each block of the detector into place now serves as the capstone on the end of the completed structure. Photo: Fermilab

    “If we want to understand the universe on a large scale, we have to understand how neutrinos behave,” he said. “Experimental observations from NOvA will be an important input into the overarching theory.”

    Neutrinos flit through ordinary matter almost as if it weren’t there, so it takes a massive detector to capture evidence of their behavior. Coan likens NOvA to a gigantic pixel camera with its honeycomb array of thousands of plastic tubes encasing highly purified mineral oil.

    Neutrinos are not observed directly, so scientists only see the tracks of their rare interactions with atoms. An accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois shoots a neutrino beam, observed first by a near detector there, then by a far detector some 500 miles away in Minnesota.

    The far detector, or “pixel camera,” is 50 feet tall by 50 feet wide and 200 feet long.

    Oscillating neutrinos change from one “type” to another: electron, muon or tau
    As the neutrinos travel they change from one type or “flavor” to another. That “oscillation” confirms the NOvA detector is functioning as designed.

    The first NOvA results were released this week at the American Physical Society’s Division of Particles and Fields conference in Ann Arbor, Mich.

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    A graphic representation of one of the first neutrino interactions captured at the NOvA far detector in northern Minnesota. The dotted red line represents the neutrino beam, generated at Fermilab in Illinois and sent through 500 miles of earth to the far detector. The image on the left is a simplified 3-D view of the detector, the top right view shows the interaction from the top of the detector, and the bottom right view shows the interaction from the side of the detector. Illustration: Fermilab
    A graphic representation of one of the first neutrino interactions captured at the NOvA far detector in northern Minnesota. The dotted red line represents the neutrino beam, generated at Fermilab in Illinois and sent through 500 miles of earth to the far detector. The image on the left is a simplified 3-D view of the detector, the top right view shows the interaction from the top of the detector, and the bottom right view shows the interaction from the side of the detector. Illustration: Fermilab

    The results were culled by scientists who sorted through millions of cosmic ray strikes to zero-in on neutrino interactions.

    “People are ecstatic to see our first observation of neutrino oscillations,” said NOvA co-spokesperson Peter Shanahan, Fermilab. “For all the people who worked over the course of a decade on the designing, building, commissioning, and operating this experiment, it’s beyond gratifying.”

    Researchers have collected data aggressively since February 2014, recording neutrino interactions in the 14,000-ton far detector in Ash River, Minnesota, while construction was still underway. This allowed the collaboration to gather data while testing systems before starting operations with the complete detector in November 2014, shortly after the experiment was completed on time and under budget. NOvA construction and operations are supported by the DOE’s Office of Science.

    The neutrino beam generated at Fermilab passes through the underground near detector, which measures the beam’s neutrino composition before it leaves the Fermilab site.

    The particles then travel more than 500 miles straight through the earth, changing types along the way. About once per second, Fermilab’s accelerator sends trillions of neutrinos to Minnesota, but the elusive neutrinos interact so rarely that only a few will register at the far detector.

    Neutrino-atom interaction releases a signature trail of particles and light
    The beam fires neutrinos every 1.5 seconds, but only for 10 microseconds, Coan said. Including downtime for maintenance, neutrinos are produced two minutes total over the course of a year.

    “We could make the detector out of iron or granite to get more target atoms and have more interactions, but we’d never be able to observe the interactions in iron and granite,” Coan said. “So the detector has to be transparent somehow, a sort of camera. Those two goals are somewhat contradictory. So it takes some cleverness to figure out how to have a massive detector and still see events in it.”

    When a neutrino bumps into an atom in the NOvA detector, it releases a signature trail of particles and light depending on which type it is: an electron, muon or tau neutrino. The beam originating at Fermilab is made almost entirely of one type – muon neutrinos – and scientists can measure how many of those muon neutrinos disappear over their journey and reappear as electron neutrinos.

    If oscillations had not occurred, experimenters predicted they would see 201 muon neutrinos arrive at the NOvA far detector in the data collected; instead, they saw a mere 33, proof that the muon neutrinos were disappearing as they transformed into the two other flavors

    Similarly, if oscillations had not occurred scientists expected to see only one electron neutrino appearance, due to background interactions, but the collaboration saw six such events, which is evidence that some of the missing muon neutrinos had turned into electron neutrinos.

    NOvA observations are nearly equivalent results to those at world’s other neutrino experiments
    Similar long-distance experiments such as T2K in Japan and MINOS at Fermilab have seen these muon neutrino-to-electron neutrino oscillations before. NOvA, which will take data for at least six years, is seeing nearly equivalent results in a shorter time frame, something that bodes well for the experiment’s ambitious goal of measuring neutrino properties that have eluded other experiments so far.

    “One of the reasons we’ve made such excellent progress is because of the impressive Fermilab neutrino beam and accelerator team,” said NOvA co-spokesperson Mark Messier of Indiana University. “Having a beam of that power running so efficiently gives us a real competitive edge and allows us to gather data quickly.”

    Fermilab’s flagship accelerator recently set a high-energy neutrino beam world record when it reached 521 kilowatts, and the laboratory is working on improving the neutrino beam even further for projects such as NOvA and the upcoming Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Researchers expect to reach 700 kilowatts early next calendar year, accumulating a slew of neutrino interactions and tripling the amount of data recorded by year’s end.

    Most abundant massive particle in the universe is still poorly understood
    Neutrinos are the most abundant massive particle in the universe, but are still poorly understood. While researchers know that neutrinos come in three types, they don’t know which is the heaviest and which is the lightest. Figuring out this ordering — one of the goals of the NOvA experiment — would be a great litmus test for theories about how the neutrino gets its mass.

    While the famed Higgs boson helps explain how some particles obtain their masses, scientists don’t know yet how the Higgs is connected to neutrinos, if at all.

    The measurement of the neutrino mass hierarchy is also crucial information for neutrino experiments trying to see if the neutrino is its own antiparticle.

    Like T2K, NOvA can also run in antineutrino mode, opening a window to see whether neutrinos and antineutrinos are fundamentally different. An asymmetry early in the universe’s history could have tipped the cosmic balance in favor of matter, making the world we see today possible. Soon, scientists will be able to combine the neutrino results obtained by T2K, MINOS and NOvA, yielding more precise answers about scientists’ most pressing neutrino questions.

    “The rapid success of the NOvA team demonstrates a commitment and talent for taking on complex projects to answer the biggest questions in particle physics,” said Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer. “We’re glad that the detectors are functioning beautifully and providing quality data that will expand our understanding of the subatomic realm.”

    The NOvA collaboration comprises 210 scientists and engineers from 39 institutions in the United States, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Greece, India, Russia and the United Kingdom. — Fermi National Laboratory, SMU

    NOvA stands for NuMI Off-Axis Electron Neutrino Appearance. NuMI is itself an acronym, standing for Neutrinos from the Main Injector, Fermilab’s flagship accelerator. The Fermilab Accelerator Complex is an Office of Science User Facility.

    For more information, visit the NOvA web site.
    Watch live particle events recorded by the NOvA experiment.
    Learn how the NOvA detector sees neutrinos.
    Follow the experiment on Facebook and Twitter, @novaexperiment.

    Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter, @smuresearch.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Ill., and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov, and follow Fermilab on Twitter at @Fermilab.

    The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    1st proton collisions at the world’s largest science experiment expected to start the first or second week of June

    “No significant signs of new physics with the present data yet but it takes only one significant deviation in the data to change everything.” — Albert De Roeck, CERN

    First collisions of protons at the world’s largest science experiment are expected to start the first or second week of June, according to a senior research scientist with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.

    “It will be about another six weeks to commission the machine, and many things can still happen on the way,” said physicist Albert De Roeck, a staff member at CERN and a professor at the University of Antwerp, Belgium and UC Davis, California. De Roeck is a leading scientist on CMS, one of the Large Hadron Collider’s key experiments.

    The LHC in early April was restarted for its second three-year run after a two-year pause to upgrade the machine to operate at higher energies. At higher energy, physicists worldwide expect to see new discoveries about the laws that govern our natural universe.

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    De Roeck made the comments Monday while speaking during an international meeting of more than 250 physicists from 30 countries on the campus of Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

    “There are no significant signs of new physics yet,” De Roeck said of the data from the first run, adding however that especially SUSY diehards — physicists who predict the existence of a unique new theory of space and time called SuperSymmetry — maintain hopes of seeing evidence soon of that theory.

    De Roeck in fact has high expectations for the possibility of new discoveries that could change the current accepted theory of physical reality, the Standard Model.

    “It will take only one significant deviation in the data to change everything,” De Roeck said. “The upgraded machine works. Now we have to get to the real operation for physics.”

    “Unidentified Lying Object” not a problem — remains stable
    But work remains to be done. One issue the accelerator physicists remain cautiously aware of, he said, is an “Unidentified Lying Object” in the beam pipe of the LHC’s 17-mile underground tunnel, a vacuum tube where proton beams collide and scatter particles that scientists then analyze for keys to unlock the mysteries of the Big Bang and the cosmos.

    Because the proton beam is sensitive to the geometry of the environment and can be easily blocked, the beam pipe must be free of even the tiniest amount of debris. Even something as large as a nitrogen particle could disrupt the beam. Because the beam pipe is a sealed vacuum it’s impossible to know what the “object” is.

    “The unidentified lying object turns out not to be a problem for the operation, it’s just something to keep an eye on,” De Roeck said. “It’s in the vacuum tube and it’s not a problem if it doesn’t move and remains stable.”

    The world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider made headlines when its global collaboration of thousands of scientists in 2012 observed a new fundamental particle, the Higgs boson. After that, the collider was paused for the extensive upgrade. Much more powerful than before, as part of Run 2 physicists on the Large Hadron Collider’s experiments are analyzing new proton collision data to unravel the structure of the Higgs.

    The Large Hadron Collider straddles the border between France and Switzerland. Its first run began in 2009, led by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, through an international consortium of thousands of scientists.

    Particle discoveries unlock mysteries of cosmos, pave way for new technology
    The workshop in Dallas, the “2015 International Workshop on Deep-Inelastic Scattering,” draws the world’s leading scientists each year to an international city for nuts and bolts talks that drive the world’s leading-edge physics experiments, such as the Large Hadron Collider.

    Going into the second run, De Roeck said physicists will continue to look for anomalies, unexpected decay modes or couplings, multi-Higgs production, or larger decay rates than expected, among other things.

    Particle discoveries by physicists resolve mysteries, such as questions surrounding Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and the earliest moments of the Big Bang. But particle discoveries also are ultimately applied to other fields to improve everyday life, such as medical technologies like MRIs and PET scans, which diagnose and treat cancer.

    For example, proton therapy is the newest non-invasive, precision scalpel in the fight against cancer, with new centers opening all over the world.

    Hosted by the SMU Department of Physics in Dedman College, the Dallas meeting of physicists began Monday, April 27, 2015, and runs through Friday, May 1, 2015.

    The workshop is sponsored by SMU, U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, CERN, National Science Foundation, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, DESY national research center and Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. — Margaret Allen

    Follow SMUResearch.com on twitter at @smuresearch.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    Physicists tune Large Hadron Collider to find “sweet spot” in high-energy proton smasher

    New launch of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator is the most stringent test yet of our accepted theories of how subatomic particles work and interact.

    Start up of the world’s largest science experiment is underway — with protons traveling in opposite directions at almost the speed of light in the deep underground tunnel called the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva.

    As protons collide, physicists will peer into the resulting particle showers for new discoveries about the universe, said Ryszard Stroynowski, a collaborator on one of the collider’s key experiments and a professor in the Department of Physics at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

    “The hoopla and enthusiastic articles generated by discovery of the Higgs boson two years ago left an impression among many people that we have succeeded, we are done, we understand everything,” said Stroynowski, who is the senior member of SMU’s Large Hadron Collider team. “The reality is far from this. The only thing that we have found is that Higgs exist and therefore the Higgs mechanism of generating the mass of fundamental particles is possible.”

    There is much more to be learned during Run 2 of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.

    The Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful proton smasher in the world, includes the ATLAS detector, one of the LHC's four particle detectors. (CERN)
    The Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful proton smasher in the world, includes the ATLAS detector, one of the LHC’s four particle detectors. (CERN)

    “In a way we kicked a can down the road because we still do not have sufficient precision to know where to look for the really, really new physics that is suggested by astronomical observations,” he said. “The observed facts that are not explained by current theory are many.”

    The LHC’s control room in Geneva on April 5 restarted the Large Hadron Collider. A project of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the 17-mile LHC tunnel — big enough to ride a bicycle through — straddles the border between France and Switzerland.

    Two years ago it made headlines worldwide when its global collaboration of thousands of scientists discovered the Higgs Boson fundamental particle.

    The Large Hadron Collider’s first run began in 2009. In 2012 it was paused for an extensive upgrade.

    The new upgraded and supercharged LHC restarts at almost twice the energy and higher intensity than it was operating at previously, so it will deliver much more data.

    The Liquid Argon Calorimeter sits at the heart of the ATLAS detector
    Data flowing from the ATLAS detector’s Liquid Argon Calorimeter — which measures the energies carried by particle interactions — is delivered via a data link computer chip developed by physicists at Southern Methodist University. (CERN)

    “I think that in the LHC Run 2 we will sieve through more data than in all particle physics experiments in the world together for the past 50 years,” Stroynowski said. “Nature would be really strange if we do not find something new.”

    SMU is active on the LHC’s ATLAS detector experiment
    Within the big LHC tunnel, gigantic particle detectors at four interaction points along the ring record the proton collisions that are generated when the beams collide.

    In routine operation, protons make 11,245 laps of the LHC per second — producing up to 1 billion collisions per second. With that many collisions, each detector captures collision events 40 million times each second.

    That’s a lot of collision data, says SMU physicist Robert Kehoe, a member of the ATLAS particle detector experiment with Stroynowski and other SMU physicists.

    Evaluating that much data isn’t humanly possible, so a computerized ATLAS hardware “trigger system” grabs the data, makes a fast evaluation, decides if it might hold something of interest to physicists, than quickly discards or saves it.

    The Liquid Argon Calorimeter sits at the heart of ATLAS, measuring the energies carried by particle interactions. (CERN)
    The Liquid Argon Calorimeter sits at the heart of ATLAS, measuring the energies carried by particle interactions. (CERN)

    “That gets rid of 99.999 percent of the data,” Kehoe said. “This trigger hardware system makes measurements — but they are very crude, fast and primitive.”

    To further pare down the data, a custom-designed software program culls even more data from each nano-second grab, reducing 40 million events down to 200.

    Two groups from SMU, one led by Kehoe, helped develop software to monitor the performance of the trigger systems’ thousands of computer processors.

    “The software program has to be accurate in deciding which 200 to keep. We must be very careful that it’s the right 200 — the 200 that might tell us more about the Higgs boson, for example. If it’s not the right 200, then we can’t achieve our scientific goals.”

    The ATLAS computers are part of CERN’s computing center, which stores more than 30 petabytes of data from the LHC experiments every year, the equivalent of 1.2 million Blu-ray discs.

    Flood of data from ATLAS transmitted via tiny electronics designed at SMU to withstand harsh conditions
    An SMU physics team also collaborates on the design, construction and delivery of the ATLAS “readout” system — an electronic system within the ATLAS trigger system that sends collision data from ATLAS to its data processing farm.

    Data from the ATLAS particle detector’s Liquid Argon Calorimeter is transmitted via 1,524 small fiber-optic transmitters. A powerful and reliable workhorse, the link is one of thousands of critical components on the LHC that contributed to discovery and precision measurement of the Higgs boson.

    The custom-made high-speed data transmitters were designed to withstand extremely harsh conditions — low temperature and high radiation.

    “It’s not always a smooth ride operating electronics in such a harsh environment,” said Jingbo Ye, the physics professor who leads the SMU data-link team. “Failure of any transmitter results in the loss of a chunk of valuable data. We’re working to improve the design for future detectors because by 2017 and 2018, the existing optical data-link design won’t be able to carry all the data.”

    Each electrical-to-optical and optical-to-electrical signal converter transmits 1.6 gigabytes of data per second. Lighter and smaller than their widely used commercial counterpart, the tiny, wickedly fast transmitters have been transmitting from the Liquid Argon Calorimeter for about 10 years.

    Upgraded optical data link is now in the works to accommodate beefed-up data flow
    A more powerful data link — much smaller and faster than the current one — is in research and development now. Slated for installation in 2017, it has the capacity to deliver 5.2 gigabytes of data per second.

    The new link’s design has been even more challenging than the first, Ye said. It has a smaller footprint than the first, but handles more data, while at the same time maintaining the existing power supply and heat exchanger now in the ATLAS detector.

    The link will have the highest data density in the world of any data link based on the transmitter optical subassembly TOSA, a standard industrial package, Ye said.

    Fine-tuning the new, upgraded machine will take several weeks
    The world’s most powerful machine for smashing protons together will require some “tuning” before physicists from around the world are ready to take data, said Stephen Sekula, a researcher on ATLAS and assistant professor of physics at SMU.

    The trick is to get reliable, stable beams that can remain in collision state for 8 to 12 to 24 hours at a time, so that the particle physicists working on the experiments, who prize stability, will be satisfied with the quality of the beam conditions being delivered to them, Sekula said.

    “The LHC isn’t a toaster,” he said. “We’re not stamping thousands of them out of a factory every day, there’s only one of them on the planet and when you upgrade it it’s a new piece of equipment with new idiosyncrasies, so there’s no guarantee it will behave as it did before.”

    Machine physicists at CERN must learn the nuances of the upgraded machine, he said. The beam must be stable, so physicists on shifts in the control room can take high-quality data under stable operating conditions.

    The process will take weeks, Sekula said.

    10 times as many Higgs particles means a flood of data to sift for gems
    LHC Run 2 will collide particles at a staggering 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV), which is 60 percent higher than any accelerator has achieved before.

    “On paper, Run 2 will give us four times more data than we took on Run 1,” Sekula said. “But each of those multiples of data are actually worth more. Because not only are we going to take more collisions, we’re going to do it at a higher energy. When you do more collisions and you do them at a higher energy, the rate at which you make Higgs Bosons goes way up. We’re going to get 10 times more Higgs than we did in run 1 — at least.”

    SMU’s ManeFrame supercomputer plays a key role in helping physicists from the Large Hadron Collider experiments. One of the fastest academic supercomputers in the nation, it allows physicists at SMU and around the world to sift through the flood of data, quickly analyze massive amounts of information, and deliver results to the collaborating scientists.

    During Run 1, the LHC delivered about 8,500 Higgs particles a week to the scientists, but also delivered a huge number of other kinds of particles that have to be sifted away to find the Higgs particles. Run 2 will make 10 times that, Sekula said. “So they’ll rain from the sky. And with more Higgs, we’ll have an easier time sifting the gems out of the gravel.”

    Run 2 will operate at the energy originally intended for Run 1, which was initially stalled by a faulty electrical connection on some superconducting magnets in a sector of the tunnel. Machine physicists were able to get the machine running — just never at full power. And still the Higgs was discovered, notes SMU physics professor Fredrick Olness.

    “The 2008 magnet accident at the LHC underscores just how complex a machine this is,” Olness said. “We are pushing the technology to the cutting-edge.”

    Huge possibilities for new discoveries, but some will be more important than others
    There are a handful of major new discoveries that could emerge from Run 2 data, Stroynowski said.

    • New physics laws related to Higgs — Physicists know only global Higgs properties, many with very poor understanding. They will be measuring Higgs properties with much greater precision, and any deviation from the present picture will indicate new physics laws. “Improved precision is the only guaranteed outcome of the coming run,” Stroynowski said. “But of course we hope that not everything will be as expected. Any deviation may be due to supersymmetry or something completely new.”
    • Why basic particles have such a huge range of masses — Clarity achieved by precision measurements of Higgs properties may help to shed light on the exact reason for the pattern of masses found in the known fundamental particles. If new particles are discovered in the LHC during Run 2, the mathematical theories that could explain them might also shed light on the puzzle of why masses have such diversity in the building blocks of nature
    • Dark matter — Astronomical observations require a new form of matter that acts only via gravity, otherwise all galaxies would have fallen apart a long time ago. One candidate theory is supersymmetry, which predicts a host of new particles. Some of those particles, if they exist, would fit the characteristics of dark matter. LHC scientists will be looking for them in the coming run both directly, and for indirect effects.
    • Quark gluon plasma — In collisions of lead nuclei with each other, LHC scientists have observed a new form of matter called quark gluon plasma. Thought to have been present in the cosmos near the very beginning of time, making and studying this state of matter could teach us more about the early, hot, dense universe.
    • Mini black-holes — Some scientists are looking for “mini black-holes” predicted by innovative physicist Stephen Hawking, but that is considered “a v-e-e-e-e-r-y long shot,” Stroynowski said.
    • Matter-antimatter — A cosmic imbalance in the amounts of matter and its opposite, antimatter, must be explained by particle physics. The LHC is home to several experiments and teams that aim to search for answers.

    — SMU, Fermilab, CERN

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    National Public Radio’s Science Friday: Understanding the dark side of physics

    Understanding what makes up dark matter and dark energy could help answer some of the biggest questions in physics

    SMU physicist Jodi Cooley appears in studio while a guest on NPR's Science Friday radio program to talk about dark matter with host Ira Flatow. (SMU: Nancy George)
    SMU physicist Jodi Cooley appears in studio while a guest on NPR’s Science Friday radio program to talk about dark matter with host Ira Flatow. (SMU: Nancy George)

    SMU physicist Jodi Cooley was a guest of Ira Flatow on National Public Radio’s Science Friday show to share in a discussion about what physicists know and don’t know about mysterious dark matter.

    Dark matter is believed to make up the bulk of the matter in the universe.

    Cooley, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics, is an experimental particle physicist and part of a scientific team searching for dark matter. She’s a member of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment.

    SuperCDMS, as the experiment is called, is currently located deep in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in an abandoned mine in a national park in Minnesota.

    SuperCDMS is a collaboration of 18 institutions from the U.S., Canada, and Spain.

    “We go deep under the earth to shield ourselves from cosmic-ray radiation so that we can use our detector technology to ‘listen’ for the passage of dark matter through the earth,” says Cooley. “Dark matter is currently believed to be a non-luminous form of matter which makes up 85 percent of the matter in the universe.”

    The next-generation of SuperCDMS is slated for construction at SNOLAB, an underground laboratory in Ontario, Canada. With SuperCDMS SNOLAB, physicists will go deeper below the surface of the earth than earlier generations of the experiment. The scientists use the earth as a shield to block out particles that resemble dark matter, making it easier to see the real thing.

    Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope discovered a ghostly ring of dark matter that formed long ago during a titanic collision between two massive galaxy clusters. The ring's discovery is among the strongest evidence yet that dark matter exists. (NASA)
    Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope discovered a ghostly ring of dark matter that formed long ago during a titanic collision between two massive galaxy clusters. The ring’s discovery is among the strongest evidence yet that dark matter exists. (NASA)

    The NPR Science Friday show aired March 27, 2015.

    Listen to the show.

    EXCERPT:

    Ira Flatow, host
    Becky Fogel, producer
    Science Friday
    Neutrons, protons, and electrons—these are the basic building blocks of matter. But this kind of matter is only a tiny fraction of the entire universe. The rest, about 95 percent, in fact, is divided between dark matter and dark energy.

    Understanding what makes up dark matter and dark energy could help answer some of the biggest questions in physics.

    Book a live interview

    jodi_smu.jpg

    To book a live or taped interview with Jodi Cooley in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

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    Physicists Jodi Cooley, Dan Hooper and Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg join Ira Flatow to discuss what we do and don’t know about this “darker” side of physics, and what we hope to learn.

    FLATOW: As an experimentalist, can you perform any experiments to see what dark matter is made out of?

    COOLEY: As a matter of fact we can, and there are different types of experiments that we can perform. The types of experiments that we perform fall into three different categories. Steven had already talked about the first kind, where you’re looking at dark matter particles interacting with other dark matter particles in the article that appeared yesterday.

    The other way that you can look for dark matter particles is, dark matter is thought to be in the galaxy all around us, so by building experiments here on earth, we can wait and try to detect the dark matter interacting with the experiments here on earth. That’s the dark matter detection I work on. The third way you could do it is at a collider at the Large Hadron Collider, collide together ordinary matter and look for dark matter coming out.

    FLATOW: Is that contemplated? They are tweaking it to come back online. Is that something they are looking for?

    COOLEY: I do believe they are. They have a working group at the Large Hadron Collider, both the ATLAS and the CDMS collaborations, both have working groups with people who are looking for a missing energy signature that could be a hint of a dark matter signal.

    Listen to the show.

    Follow SMUResearch.com on twitter at @smuresearch.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    Fermilab Symmetry: From the Standard Model to space

    A group of scientists who started at particle physics experiments move their careers to the final frontier.

    SMU graduate student Ryan Rios in the control room at CERN's Large Hadron Collider experiment.
    SMU graduate student Ryan Rios in the control room at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider experiment.

    Symmetry Magazine, the monthly publication of the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, featured SMU physics alum Ryan Rios in an article about physicists working at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

    Rios was a graduate student in the SMU Department of Physics and as part of a team led by SMU Physics Professor Ryszard Stroynowski spent from 2007 to 2012 as a member of the ATLAS experiment at Switzerland-based CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the largest high-energy physics experiment in the world. Rios and the SMU team were part of the successful search for the Higgs boson fundamental particle.

    Rios is now a senior research engineer for Lockheed Martin at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

    Read the full story.

    EXCERPT:

    By Glenn Roberts Jr.
    Symmetry Magazine
    As a member of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, Ryan Rios spent 2007 to 2012 surrounded by fellow physicists.
    Now, as a senior research engineer for Lockheed Martin at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, he still sees his fair share.

    He’s not the only scientist to have made the leap from experimenting on Earth to keeping astronauts safe in space. Rios works on a small team that includes colleagues with backgrounds in physics, biology, radiation health, engineering, information technology and statistics.

    “I didn’t really leave particle physics, I just kind of changed venues,” Rios says. “A lot of the skillsets I developed on ATLAS I was able to transfer over pretty easily.”

    The group at Johnson Space Center supports current and planned crewed space missions by designing, testing and monitoring particle detectors that measure radiation levels in space.

    Massive solar flares and other solar events that accelerate particles, other sources of cosmic radiation, and weak spots in Earth’s magnetic field can all pose radiation threats to astronauts. Members of the radiation group provide advisories on such sources. This makes it possible to warn astronauts, who can then seek shelter in heavier-shielded areas of the spacecraft.

    Johnson Space Center has a focus on training and supporting astronauts and planning for future crewed missions. Rios has done work for the International Space Station and the robotic Orion mission that launched in December as a test for future crewed missions. His group recently developed a new radiation detector for the space station crew.

    Rios worked at CERN for four years as a graduate student and postdoc at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. At CERN he was introduced to a physics analysis platform called ROOT, which is also used at NASA. Some of the particle detectors he works with now were developed by a CERN-based collaboration.

    Fellow Johnson Space Center worker Kerry Lee wound up a group lead for radiation operations after using ROOT during his three years as a summer student on the Collider Detector at Fermilab, or CDF experiment.

    Read the full story.

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    FOX 4 DFW: SMU’s supercomputer aids in search for particles present during Big Bang

    International team of physicists study elusive fundamental particles present at origins of universe, and which still bombard us today.

    SMU physicist Thomas E. Coan talked with Fox 4 DFW reporter Dan Godwin about the neutrino, an elusive fundamental particle that scientists are working to understand using one of the most powerful physics experiments in the world.

    Godwin hosted Coan on the program Fox4Ward on Nov. 30, 2014. Coan and Godwin discussed neutrinos, one of the most elusive particles in the Standard Model’s “particle zoo.”

    Neutrinos are the subject of the NOvA experiment, with the goal to better understand the origins of matter and the inner workings of the universe.

    One of the largest and most powerful neutrino experiments in the world, NOvA is funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.

    At the heart of NOvA are its two particle detectors — gigantic machines of plastic and electronic arrays.

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    ManeFrame, SMU, Thomas Coan, supercomputer, NOvA, neutrinos

    To book a live or taped interview with Dr. Thomas E. Coan in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

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    One detector is at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago and the other is at Ash River, Minn. near the Canadian border.

    Critical to crunching data from the experiment is a network of supercomputers, including the SMU ManeFrame, one of the most powerful academic supercomputers in the nation.

    Designed and engineered by about a hundred U.S. and international scientists, NOvA is managed by Fermilab. NOvA’s detectors and its particle accelerator officially started up at the end of October 2014.

    Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics, is a member of the NOvA experiment. He is co-convener of NOvA’s calibration and alignment group, guiding a crew of international scientists who handle responsibility for understanding the response of NOvA’s detector when neutrinos pass through and strike it.

    Neutrinos are invisible fundamental particles that are so abundant they constantly bombard us and pass through us at a rate of more than 100,000 billion particles a second. Because they rarely interact with matter, they have eluded scientific observation.

    Watch the Fox 4Ward interview, SMU Physics Experiments.

    EXCERPT:

    By Dan Godwin
    Fox 4Ward Host
    When you talk about the origin of the universe, the Big Bang is widely accepted theory. But it never hurts to have additional evidence. And that’s where an SMU super computer comes in. In this FOX 4Ward, Dan Godwin finds out why the smallest particles in the universe are getting lots of scrutiny.

    Watch the Fox 4Ward interview, SMU Physics Experiments.

    Follow SMUResearch.com on twitter at @smuresearch.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    KERA Think: Tiny Particles, Big Impact

    SMU physicist Thomas Coan talked with KERA about the neutrino, an elusive fundamental particle that scientists are working to understand using one of the most powerful physics experiments in the world.

    KERA public radio 90.1 hosted SMU physicist Thomas E. Coan on Krys Boyd‘s “Think” program Oct. 29. Coan and Boyd discussed neutrinos, one of the most elusive particles in the Standard Model’s “particle zoo.”

    Neutrinos are the subject of the NOvA experiment, with the goal to better understand the origins of matter and the inner workings of the universe.

    One of the largest and most powerful neutrino experiments in the world, NOvA is funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.

    At the heart of NOvA are its two particle detectors — gigantic machines of plastic and electronic arrays. One detector is at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago and the other is at Ash River, Minn. near the Canadian border.

    Book a live interview

    ManeFrame, SMU, Thomas Coan, supercomputer, NOvA, neutrinos

    To book a live or taped interview with Dr. Thomas E. Coan in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

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    Designed and engineered by about a hundred U.S. and international scientists, NOvA is managed by Fermilab. NOvA’s detectors and its particle accelerator officially start up the end of October 2014.

    Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics, is a member of the NOvA experiment. He is co-convener of NOvA’s calibration and alignment group, guiding a crew of international scientists who handle responsibility for understanding the response of NOvA’s detector when it is struck by neutrinos.

    Neutrinos are invisible fundamental particles that are so abundant they constantly bombard us and pass through us at a rate of more than 100,000 billion particles a second. Because they rarely interact with matter, they have eluded scientific observation.

    Listen to the podcast Tiny Particles, Big Impact.

    Follow SMUResearch.com on twitter at @smuresearch.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    Hunt begins for elusive neutrino particle at one of the world’s largest, most powerful detectors

    Elusive particle that is one of the building blocks of matter holds the key to space, time, matter, energy and origins of the universe

    When scientists pour 3.0 million gallons of mineral oil into what are essentially 350,000 giant plastic tubes, the possibility of a leak can’t be overlooked, says SMU physicist Thomas E. Coan.

    The oil and tubes are part of the integral structure of the world’s newest experiment to understand neutrinos — invisible fundamental particles that are so abundant they constantly bombard us and pass through us at a rate of more than 100,000 billion particles a second.

    Neutrinos rarely interact with matter and so mostly pass through objects completely unnoticed. The purpose of NOvA, as the new experiment is called, is to better understand neutrinos. That knowledge may lead to a clearer picture of the origins of matter and the inner workings of the universe, Coan said.

    ”Neutrinos are thought to play a key but still somewhat murky role in explaining how the universe evolved to contain just the matter we see today and somehow disposing of the antimatter present at the Big Bang,” he said.

    A massive pivoting machine moves one block of the NOvA far detector across the hall in Ash River, Minn., to connect it with the rest of the detector. Each block measures 50 feet by 50 feet by 6 feet, and was assembled from PVC modules. (Credit: Fermilab)
    A massive pivoting machine moves one block of the NOvA far detector across the hall in Ash River, Minn., to connect it with the rest of the detector. Each block measures 50 feet by 50 feet by 6 feet, and was assembled from PVC modules. (Credit: Fermilab)

    Coan is an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics and a member of the NOvA experiment. “Solving this riddle is likely to require many experiments to get the story correct,” he said. “NOvA is a next step along what is likely to be a twisty path.”

    At the heart of NOvA are its two particle detectors — gigantic machines of plastic and electronic arrays, one at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago and the other in Ash River, Minn. near the Canadian border.

    Designed and engineered by about a hundred U.S. and international scientists, NOvA is managed by Fermilab. NOvA’s detectors and its particle accelerator officially start up the end of October.

    “There are essentially zero leaks,” Coan said. “This was a bit of a surprise. It guarantees that critical electronics won’t be damaged by leaking oil and that the detector will be highly efficient for detecting the neutrinos we aim at it.”

    One of the largest and most powerful neutrino experiments in the world, NOvA is funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.

    SMU graduate student Biao Wang is 300 feet underground in front of the close detector. Under the direction of SMU physicist Thomas Coan, Wang works on the maintenance and trouble shooting of the detector as an on-call expert for the cooling system of the read-out electronics.
    SMU graduate student Biao Wang is 300 feet underground in front of the NOvA close detector. Under the direction of SMU physicist Thomas Coan, Wang works on the maintenance and trouble shooting of the detector as an on-call expert for the cooling system of the read-out electronics.

    It has the world’s most powerful beam of neutrinos, is the most powerful accelerator neutrino experiment ever built in the United States, and is the longest distance neutrino experiment in the world.

    Coan, a co-convener of NOvA’s calibration and alignment group, guides a crew of international scientists who handle responsibility for understanding the response of NOvA’s detector when it is struck by neutrinos.

    “The detector has been behaving extremely well,” Coan said, noting NOvA scientists were delighted by the machine’s successful performance during testing after five years of construction.

    Neutrino beam will travel near speed of light
    Central to the detector are its rectangular plastic tubes staggered in horizontal and vertical layers. As neutrinos strike the oil-filled plastic tubes, the interaction makes the oil — liquid scintillator — faintly glow and creates various particles.

    Special green fiberoptic cables in the plastic tubes transmit the faint glow from the liquid scintillator to photosensors at one end of each tube, where the light is converted to bursts of electricity which in turn are sent to nearby computers.

    When a neutrino strikes an atom in the liquid scintillator filling the 15-kiloton far detector, it releases a burst of charged particles. Scientists can detect these particles and use them to learn about neutrino interactions.
    When a neutrino strikes an atom in the liquid scintillator filling the 15-kiloton far detector, it releases a burst of charged particles. Scientists can detect these particles and use them to learn about neutrino interactions.

    “We don’t actually see the neutrinos,” Coan said. “We see the particles that are the after-party — the final state particles produced by the neutrinos after they strike the detector.”

    SMU’s supercomputer ManeFrame will have a high-profile role with NOvA. SMU will contribute four million processing hours each year to the experiment, Coan said.

    The process begins when NOvA’s underground accelerator near Chicago shoots a beam of neutrinos at nearly the speed of light to the particle detectors. Plans call for the accelerator to run for six years or more, stopping only occasionally for maintenance breaks.

    “This is a long process,” Coan said. “That is uncommon in our modern culture where we tend to expect quick results. But it will take time for us to capture enough data to do all the science we want to do. It will take years. In a couple weeks Fermilab will start bringing the beam back — which is a more complicated process than just pushing a few buttons and starting it up.”

    Scientists hope to discover the properties of neutrinos
    NOvA’s purpose is to capture a significant volume of data to allow scientists to draw conclusions about the properties of neutrinos.

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    Those properties may hold answers to the nature of matter, energy, space and time, and lead to understanding the origins of the universe.

    Specifically, Coan said, NOvA physicists want to know how different types of neutrinos morph from one kind to another, the probability for that to occur, the relative weight of neutrinos, and the difference in behavior between neutrinos and anti-neutrinos.

    NOvA’s particle detectors were both constructed within the neutrino beam sent from Fermilab in Batavia, Ill. to northern Minnesota. The 300-ton near detector observes the neutrinos as they embark on their journey through the earth, with no tunnel needed. The 14,000-ton far detector spots those neutrinos after their 500-mile trip, and allows scientists to analyze how they change over that long distance.

    Construction on NOvA’s two massive neutrino detectors began in 2009. The Department of Energy in September said construction of the experiment was completed on schedule and under budget.

    Scientists predict detectors will catch only a few neutrinos a day
    For the next six years, Fermilab will send tens-of thousands of billions of neutrinos every second in a beam aimed at both detectors, and scientists expect to catch only a few each day in the far detector.

    From this data, scientists hope to learn more about how and why neutrinos change between one type and another. The three types, called flavors, are the muon, electron and tau neutrino. Over longer distances, neutrinos can flip between these flavors.

    NOvA is specifically designed to study muon neutrinos changing into electron neutrinos. Unraveling this mystery may help scientists understand why the universe is composed of matter, and why that matter was not annihilated by antimatter after the Big Bang.

    Scientists also will probe the still-unknown masses of the three types of neutrinos in an attempt to determine which is the heaviest.

    “Neutrino research is an important part of the worldwide particle physics program,” said Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer.

    First results expected in 2015
    The far detector in Minnesota is believed to be the largest free-standing plastic structure in the world, at 200 feet long, 50 feet high and 50 feet wide. Both detectors are constructed from PVC, and filled with the scintillating liquid that gives off light. The data acquisition system creates 3-D pictures of the interactions for scientists to analyze.

    The NOvA far detector in Ash River saw its first long-distance neutrinos in November 2013.

    “Building the NOvA detectors was a wide-ranging effort that involved hundreds of people in several countries,” said Gary Feldman, co-spokesperson of the NOvA experiment.

    The NOvA collaboration comprises 208 scientists from 38 institutions in the United States, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Greece, India, Russia and the United Kingdom.

    NOvA stands for NuMI Off-Axis Electron Neutrino Appearance. NuMI is itself an acronym, standing for Neutrinos from the Main Injector, Fermilab’s flagship accelerator. — Margaret Allen, SMU; Fermilab

    Follow SMUResearch.com on twitter at @smuresearch.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    KERA: Telescope-Wielding Twosome: High School Students Discover New Stars

    Their five stars will be known by 16-digit serial numbers. Dominik would have rather immortalized his four dogs.

    Lake Highlands High School students Dominik Fritz (left) and Jason Barton collected data until they had what they needed to define their star-to-be as a variable — a star that changes brightness. (Credit: KERA)
    Lake Highlands High School students Dominik Fritz (right) and Jason Barton collected data until they had what they needed to define their star-to-be as a variable — a star that changes brightness. (Credit: KERA)

    Reporter Courtney Collins with the news team at public radio station KERA covered the discovery of five stars made by two Dallas high school students as members of an SMU summer physics research program. Called Quarknet, the program enabled the students to analyze data gleaned from a high-powered telescope in the New Mexico desert.

    All five stars are eclipsing contact binary stars, pairs of stars that orbit around each other so closely that their outer atmospheres touch. As the stars eclipse, they dim and then brighten as one emerges from behind the other. These stars are categorized as variable stars, stars that change brightness, which make up half the stars in the universe.

    Lake Highlands High School seniors Dominik Fritz and Jason Barton are the first high school researchers at SMU to discover new stars.

    Fritz and Barton are among nine high school students and two high school physics teachers who conducted physics research at SMU through the QuarkNet program.

    Collins’ segment published and aired Sept. 4, “Telescope-Wielding Twosome: High School Students Discover New Stars.”

    Listen to the segment and read the full story.

    EXCERPT:

    By Courtney Collins
    KERA News
    To most teenagers, star-gazing is the stuff of first dates.

    For two seniors at Lake Highlands High School in Dallas, star-gazing over the summer led to five unusual discoveries.

    In some respects, Dominik Fritz and Jason Barton are typical high-schoolers. Jason’s haircut would make a pop star envious and Dominik’s snazzy specs are effortlessly cool.

    When these two kids start to talk science, you realize quickly, they’re two in a million.

    “I’m personally fascinated by nuclear reactions and that’s basically what happens in stars, it’s full of nuclear reactions, nuclear fusion, a little bit of fission,” Dominik says.

    That set of interests made Dominik a perfect candidate for a summer physics program at SMU. Jason and two other Richardson school district students joined him.

    While analyzing data from a high-powered telescope, Jason noticed a few stars that weren’t already in the database.

    “I started looking over several nights and seeing if they were actual variable stars and if they did change in brightness over time, and then I combined them all and then I eventually submitted it,” Jason says.

    In fact, both teens made submission to an international star index that were accepted. Between them, they’d discovered five eclipsing binary contact stars. Dominik translates:

    “Two very, very large star systems that are so close that they actually share their atmospheres.”

    Lake Highlands physics teacher Ken Taylor says not many kids make it to upper level physics. That’s why he was so keen to get these students out of the textbook and into real research.

    “It was beautiful for me to see my students who were going and forging ahead and taking things that they had learned and going into new territory and seeing the looks on their faces when they began to go somewhere where, in a sense, no one had gone before.”

    Listen to the segment and read the full story.

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    DMN: Two high school students discover variable stars during SMU summer program

    Two high school students collected data until they had what they needed to define their star-to-be as a variable — a star that changes brightness.

    Lake Highlands High School students Dominik Fritz (left) and Jason Barton collected data until they had what they needed to define their star-to-be as a variable — a star that changes brightness. (Credit: DMN)
    Lake Highlands High School students Dominik Fritz (left) and Jason Barton collected data until they had what they needed to define their star-to-be as a variable — a star that changes brightness. (Credit: DMN)

    Reporter Alexis Espinosa with the Dallas Morning News covered the discovery of five stars made by two Dallas high school students as members of an SMU summer physics research program. Called Quarknet, the program enabled the students to analyze data gleaned from a high-powered telescope in the New Mexico desert.

    All five stars are eclipsing contact binary stars, pairs of stars that orbit around each other so closely that their outer atmospheres touch. As the stars eclipse, they dim and then brighten as one emerges from behind the other. These stars are categorized as variable stars, stars that change brightness, which make up half the stars in the universe.

    Lake Highlands High School seniors Dominik Fritz and Jason Barton are the first high school researchers at SMU to discover new stars.

    Fritz and Barton are among nine high school students and two high school physics teachers who conducted physics research at SMU through the QuarkNet program.

    Read the full story.

    EXCERPT:

    By Alexis Espinosa
    Dallas Morning News
    Dominik Fritz sat in a Southern Methodist University science lab sifting through data. He hoped to discover a star by searching through months of information collected from a telescope in the New Mexico desert 14 years ago.
    And then he found it.

    He found a star whose variation had not yet been defined. And he would be the one to define it.

    He collected data until he had everything he needed to define it as a variable — a star that changes brightness. A day after he submitted the star to the American Association of Variable Star Observers, the organization requested a few minor corrections.

    And then, his star was accepted.

    “I was so, so happy. My name is out there. I felt like I really accomplished something,” Fritz said. “I can literally tell people … ‘I found a star.’”

    Fritz and a classmate, Jason Barton, both discovered stars this summer as part of the SMU’s QuarkNet program.

    QuarkNet is a physics teacher development program funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy in universities and laboratories across the country. SMU’s QuarkNet program, which began in 2000, also provides research opportunities to high school students like Fritz and Barton, who are seniors at Lake Highlands High School in Richardson ISD.

    Read the full story.

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    Eclipsing binary stars discovered by high school students at SMU summer research program

    Treasures of the night sky: Pairs of stars orbit around each other so closely their outer atmospheres touch, so they dim and brighten.

    Artist's impression of an eclipsing binary star system. As the two stars orbit each other they pass in front of one another and their combined brightness, seen from a distance, decreases.
    Artist’s impression of an eclipsing binary star system. The stars pass in front of one another and their combined brightness decreases. (Credit: European Southern Observatory)

    Two Dallas high school students discovered five stars as members of an SMU summer physics research program that enabled them to analyze data gleaned from a high-powered telescope in the New Mexico desert.

    All five stars are eclipsing contact binary stars, pairs of stars that orbit around each other so closely that their outer atmospheres touch. As the stars eclipse, they dim and then brighten as one emerges from behind the other. These stars are categorized as variable stars, stars that change brightness, which make up half the stars in the universe.

    Lake Highlands High School seniors Dominik Fritz and Jason Barton are the first high school researchers at SMU to discover new stars.

    Their discoveries have been accepted into the American Association of Variable Star Observers International Variable Star Index (VSX).

    New discoveries in Pegasus, Ursa Major are registered with Variable Star Index

    The stars are located in the northern sky constellations of Pegasus and Ursa Major, but can’t be seen by the naked eye.

    Lake Highlands High School student Dominik Fritz and teacher Ken Taylor at SMU. Fritz participated in Quarknet, a Dedman Physics program for area high school students. (Photo Credit here)
    Lake Highlands High School student Dominik Fritz and teacher Ken Taylor at SMU. Fritz participated in Quarknet, an SMU Physics Department program for area high school students. (Photo Credit here)

    Working in a campus science building basement laboratory, the students used analysis software, perseverance and patience to parse the data collected (but never analyzed for the purpose of studying binary stars) in 2000 by Robert Kehoe, SMU associate professor of physics.

    Kehoe collected the data through ROTSE-I, a prototype robotic telescope at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

    “Scientists are driven by the sense of discovery,” says Kehoe, who took the data originally to study gamma ray bursts. “These students can lay claim to information that didn’t exist before their research.”

    SMU only university in North Texas offering the nation’s QuarkNet program
    Fritz and Barton are among nine high school students and two high school physics teachers conducting physics research at SMU through the QuarkNet program.

    QuarkNet is a physics teacher development program with 50 centers at U.S. universities and national laboratories. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, the program gives teachers and students opportunities to learn about the most recent discoveries in physics.

    Other sponsors include two of the world’s leading high-energy physics research centers — CERN in Switzerland and Fermilab in Illinois. SMU is one of four Texas universities to offer the QuarkNet program and the only QuarkNet university in North Texas.

    “High school physics curriculum includes very little modern physics,” says Simon Dalley, a member of the SMU physics faculty and coordinator of its QuarkNet program. “This hurts recruitment to the field and prevents the general population from understanding physics’ contribution to the modern world.”

    Ken Taylor, Lake Highlands High School physics teacher, is determined to introduce new physics research to his students. He has participated in QuarkNet at SMU since 2000, seizing opportunities to join physics researchers at high-energy particle colliders at CERN and Fermilab. This is the first summer he has selected students to join him in physics research at SMU.

    “I like to support students beyond the classroom walls,” he says. “These students have gone through the whole process of scientific discovery and can use these projects as jumping off points for the next phases of their lives.”

    With acceptance into the VSX catalog of variable stars, the students’ names are forever linked with their stars on the official registry.

    But instead of creating new star names, star discoverers follow a protocol that includes the name of the telescope and the stellar coordinates.

    Dominik Fritz discovered ROTSE1 J115128.40+493130.5, ROTSE1 J120809.03+503321.7 and ROTSE1 J232109.31+170125.6.

    Jason Barton can include his stars, ROTSE1 J223452.37+175210.5 and ROTSE1 J223707.20+212657.9, on his resume.

    Both students plan to pursue science careers, Fritz in nuclear engineering and Barton in medicine.

    Other student QuarkNet researchers include KeShawn Ivory from Garland High School and Madison Monzingo and Lane Toungate from Lake Highlands High School. In addition, Hockaday School teacher Leon de Oliveira and his four students – Eliza Cope, Allison Aldrich, Sarah Zhou and Mary Zhong — also conducted QuarkNet research this summer.

    “These students have made a real contribution to science,” says Farley Ferrante, the former high school physics teacher and current SMU astrophysics graduate student who supervised the students’ research. “A better understanding of variable stars helps us to understand the age and formation of the universe; the sun, which is a variable star; and even the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.”

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    Hunt for dark matter takes physicists deep below earth’s surface, where WIMPS can’t hide

    The next-generation of the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, called SuperCDMS, is slated for construction at SNOLAB, an underground laboratory in Ontario, Canada

    SuperCDMS, SNOLAB, dark matter

    Dark matter makes up much of the universe, and surrounds us all like an invisible soup. Physicists have hunted dark matter particles for decades, but they continue to elude observation.

    Now a major international experiment aimed at discovering dark matter could be constructed and operational by 2018, according to the consortium of scientists on the experiment known by its acronym, SuperCDMS SNOLAB.

    With SuperCDMS SNOLAB, physicists will go deeper below the surface of the earth than earlier generations of the experiment. Deep underground, scientists use the earth as a shield to block out particles that resemble dark matter, making it easier to see the real thing.

    Physicists have begun research and design and are building prototypes for the next-generation SuperCDMS, known by its full name as the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search. It will be located at SNOLAB, an existing underground science laboratory in Ontario, Canada, said physicist Jodi Cooley, a SuperCDMS scientist.

    As an experimental particle physicist, Cooley heads the dark matter project team at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and is a designated principal investigator, or lead scientist, on the SuperCDMS experiments.

    Research and design of SuperCDMS SNOLAB is slated to continue through 2015, with fabrication in 2016 and 2017. The experiment could be ready for operational testing by 2018, Cooley said.

    DOE and NSF announce support for SuperCDMS SNOLAB
    The U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation recently announced they will fund SuperCDMS SNOLAB — as well as two other unrelated dark matter experiments — as part of a committed U.S. scientific focus on furthering investigation into elusive dark matter. The agencies previously funded the predecessors to SuperCDMS SNOLAB, known as SuperCDMS Soudan and CDMS.

    “This is a very exciting time in our field, and I think the United States is well-positioned to play a key role,” said Cooley, an associate professor in SMU’s Department of Physics. “The three experiments chosen, SuperCDMS, LZ and AMDX, are complementary and together provide sensitivity to a large variety of potential dark matter candidates. In particular, SuperCDMS provides unprecedented sensitivity to light dark-matter candidates.”

    SuperCDMS SNOLAB is a collaboration of physicists from 21 institutions in the United States, Canada and Europe.

    Dark matter — the next unsolved mystery, and a key to the Universe
    There has long been evidence that dark matter exists and is a large part of the matter that makes up the Universe. A handful of experiments around the globe, including SuperCDMS Soudan and CDMS II, use different methods to focus on the hunt for dark matter.

    The design of SuperCDMS SNOLAB, which is among the world’s leading dark matter projects, enables it to look for WIMPS, short for weakly interacting massive particles.

    WIMPS are a generic class of dark matter, with an unknown mass that could be either “light” or “heavy.” SuperCDMS has unprecedented sensitivity to the light mass, sometimes called low mass, WIMPS. The LZ experiment will have unprecedented sensitivity to heavy mass, or high mass, WIMPS. AMDX looks for a different type of dark matter called an axion.

    CDMS and SuperCDMS Soudan also focus on lower mass dark matter.

    Deep below the ground, to block out distractions
    SuperCDMS SNOLAB will be constructed 6,800 feet underground — much deeper than CDMS or SuperCDMS Soudan, which are 2,341 feet below the earth in an abandoned underground iron mine near Soudan, Minn. Depth decreases what Cooley refers to as the “background noise” of other particles that can mimic dark matter or cloud an observation.

    DOE and NSF announced they would fund dark matter experiments in the wake of recommendations in May from their Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, a task force of the DOE and NSF made up of U.S. physicists.

    In its report, the panel didn’t specify any particular dark matter experiments for funding, but broadly concluded that investment in the search for dark matter is key for the United States to maintain its status as a global leader in addressing the most pressing scientific questions.

    Total projected cost for SuperCDMS SNOLAB is about $30 million.

    SuperCDMS: How it works
    The heart of SuperCDMS is an array of 42 detectors the size of hockey pucks, stacked atop one another in a copper canister encased in a large cooling tower. Their purpose is to capture any evidence of dark matter with their silicon and germanium surfaces, which are cooled to near absolute zero to measure single particle interactions.

    SuperCDMS SNOLAB is a ramped-up version of its predecessors, with 10 times the sensitivity to detect a full range of WIMPS, from 1 to 1,000 gigaelectronvolts.

    SMU’s SuperCDMS project team is participating in the design and development of the shielding at SuperCDMS SNOLAB and the selection of radio-pure materials that will be used in the construction of the experiment. The shielding’s purpose is to shield the detectors from background particles — the interaction signatures of neutrons — that can mimic the behavior of WIMPS. Jodi Cooley explains the SMU team’s search for ultra-pure construction materials for the detectors.

    SMU’s dark matter research is funded through a $1 million Early Career Development Award that Cooley was awarded in 2012 from the National Science Foundation.

    Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and SLAC National Laboratory are the lead laboratories on SuperCDMS Soudan and contribute scientific staff, project management, and engineering and design staff.

    Besides SMU and Fermilab, institutions with scientists on SuperCDMS include the California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Queen’s University, Texas A&M University, University of California-Berkeley, University of Florida, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique-LPN, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Santa Clara University, Stanford University, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, University of Colorado, University of Minnesota, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, SLAC/Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Syracuse University, University of British Columbia, University of Evansville and the University of South Dakota. — Margaret Allen

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    Houston Chronicle: Texas scientists spot 12-billion-year old star explosion

    “You’re looking at things a long time ago in the universe, you can get a sense for the movie of the universe,” said Kehoe. “It’s the evolution of the universe.”

    The Texas newspaper the Houston Chronicle covered the astronomy research of physicist Robert Kehoe, SMU professor, and two graduate students in the SMU Department of Physics, Farley Ferrante and Govinda Dhungana.

    The astronomy team in May reported observation of intense light from the enormous explosion of a star more than 12 billion years ago — shortly after the Big Bang — that recently reached Earth and was visible in the sky.

    Known as a gamma-ray burst, light from the rare, high-energy explosion traveled for 12.1 billion years before it was detected and observed by a telescope, ROTSE-IIIb, owned by SMU.

    Book a live interview

    To book a live or taped interview with Robert Kehoe in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

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    Gamma-ray bursts are believed to be the catastrophic collapse of a star at the end of its life. SMU physicists report that their telescope was the first on the ground to observe the burst and to capture an image.

    Recorded as GRB 140419A by NASA’s Gamma-ray Coordinates Network, the burst was spotted at 11 p.m. April 19 by SMU’s robotic telescope at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas.

    Houston Chronicle reporter Heather Alexander reported the news in his article “Texas scientists spot 12-billion-year old star explosion.”

    Read the full story.

    EXCERPT:

    By Heather Alexander
    Houston Chronicle

    Texas scientists have spotted a massive explosion in space that dates back 12 billion years, almost to the time of the Big Bang, according to Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

    NASA satellites recorded the burst and signalled back to the McDonald Observatory in West Texas. Telescope pictures showed a gamma ray burst, believed to be the collapse of a star.

    “Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the universe since the Big Bang,” said graduate student Farley Ferrante, who was monitoring the telescope. “These bursts release more energy in 10 seconds than our Earth’s sun during its entire expected lifespan of 10 billion years.”

    The scientists said explosions like this are key to understanding the development of the universe.

    “Twelve billion years ago, it was a very different universe,” said Robert Kehoe, physics professor and leader of the SMU astronomy team. “It was just hydrogen and helium. There were no rocks, there was no matter; our solar system had not formed.”

    Kehoe says explosions like the one shown in the photo are stars exploding, scattering new elements like carbon, oxygen, silicon and iron into the surrounding area.

    Read the full story.

    Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter.

    For more information, www.smuresearch.com.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    Digital Journal: Scientists spot 12-billion-year-old star burst

    A star exploded billions of years back, but the light of this explosion has just reached the earth, allowing scientists to peep into the past of the universe

    The news web site digitaljournal.com covered the astronomy research of physicist Robert Kehoe, SMU professor, and two graduate students in the SMU Department of Physics, Farley Ferrante and Govinda Dhungana.

    The astronomy team in May reported observation of intense light from the enormous explosion of a star more than 12 billion years ago — shortly after the Big Bang — that recently reached Earth and was visible in the sky.

    Known as a gamma-ray burst, light from the rare, high-energy explosion traveled for 12.1 billion years before it was detected and observed by a telescope, ROTSE-IIIb, owned by SMU.

    Book a live interview

     

    To book a live or taped interview with Robert Kehoe in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

    Related links

    More SMU Research news

    Jill Allor, SMU, reading, intellectual disabilityLow IQ students learn to read at 1st-grade level after persistent, intensive instruction
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    Gamma-ray bursts are believed to be the catastrophic collapse of a star at the end of its life. SMU physicists report that their telescope was the first on the ground to observe the burst and to capture an image.

    Recorded as GRB 140419A by NASA’s Gamma-ray Coordinates Network, the burst was spotted at 11 p.m. April 19 by SMU’s robotic telescope at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas.

    Digitaljournal.com reporter Sonia D’Costa reported the news in her article “Scientists spot 12-billion-year-old star burst.”

    Read the full story.

    EXCERPT:

    By Sonia D’Costa
    digitaljournal.com

    A star exploded billions of years back, but the light of this explosion has just reached the earth, allowing scientists to peep into the past of the universe and figure out what it might have been like during the earliest stages of its development.

    The light was observed through a telescope at the McDonald Observatory at Fort Davis in Texas. Called a gamma-ray burst, this stellar explosion is believed to have taken place just after the Big Bang, over 12 billion years in the past.

    Farley Ferrante, a physics student at the Southern Methodist University (SMU), which owns the telescope, said: “Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the universe since the Big Bang. These bursts release more energy in 10 seconds than our Earth’s sun during its entire expected lifespan of 10 billion years.”

    Read the full story.

    Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter.

    For more information, www.smuresearch.com.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    Global Post: Light from this 12-billion-year-old explosion just reached Earth

    To put the age of the latest discovery into context, scientists believe the Big Bang occurred 13.81 billion years ago.

    The news service Global Post covered the astronomy research of physicist Robert Kehoe, SMU professor, and two graduate students in the SMU Department of Physics, Farley Ferrante and Govinda Dhungana.

    The astronomy team in May reported observation of intense light from the enormous explosion of a star more than 12 billion years ago — shortly after the Big Bang — that recently reached Earth and was visible in the sky.

    Known as a gamma-ray burst, light from the rare, high-energy explosion traveled for 12.1 billion years before it was detected and observed by a telescope, ROTSE-IIIb, owned by SMU.

    Book a live interview

    To book a live or taped interview with Robert Kehoe in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

    Related links

    More SMU Research news

    Jill Allor, SMU, reading, intellectual disabilityLow IQ students learn to read at 1st-grade level after persistent, intensive instruction
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    Gamma-ray bursts are believed to be the catastrophic collapse of a star at the end of its life. SMU physicists report that their telescope was the first on the ground to observe the burst and to capture an image.

    Recorded as GRB 140419A by NASA’s Gamma-ray Coordinates Network, the burst was spotted at 11 p.m. April 19 by SMU’s robotic telescope at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas.

    Global Post reporter Sarah Wolfe reported the news in his article “Light from this 12-billion-year-old explosion just reached Earth.”

    Read the full story.

    EXCERPT:

    By Sarah Wolfe
    Global Post

    It took 12 billion years, but light from a massive explosion that occurred shortly after the Big Bang has just reached Earth.

    The rare gamma-ray burst could help scientists understand more about the early universe.

    Recorded as GRB 140423A, the explosion was first observed in April by the telescope Rotse-IIIB at an observatory in western Texas owned by Southern Methodist University.

    The area of the explosion’s peak afterglow, circled in blue and yellow, can be seen in the image above. A bright star sits to its left.

    Gamma-ray bursts are believed to be the catastrophic collapse of a star at the end of its life.

    “As NASA points out, gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the universe since the Big Bang,” Farley Ferrante, a graduate student at Southern Methodist University who monitored the explosions with astronomers in Hawaii and Turkey, said in a release from the university.

    “These bursts release more energy in 10 seconds than our Earth’s sun during its entire expected lifespan of 10 billion years.”

    Scientists weren’t even able to detect visual light from gamma-ray bursts until technology improved in the late 1990s. Gamma rays have the shortest wavelengths and can only be seen using special detectors.

    Read the full story.

    Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter.

    For more information, www.smuresearch.com.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    CBS News: See an exploding star from 12 billion years ago

    Armed with images of the burst, astronomers can now analyze the data in order to understand more about the structure of the universe at its infancy

    CBS News covered the astronomy research of physicist Robert Kehoe, SMU professor, and two graduate students in the SMU Department of Physics, Farley Ferrante and Govinda Dhungana.

    The astronomy team in May reported observation of intense light from the enormous explosion of a star more than 12 billion years ago — shortly after the Big Bang — that recently reached Earth and was visible in the sky.

    Known as a gamma-ray burst, light from the rare, high-energy explosion traveled for 12.1 billion years before it was detected and observed by a telescope, ROTSE-IIIb, owned by SMU.

    Book a live interview

     

    To book a live or taped interview with Robert Kehoe in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

    Related links

    More SMU Research news

    Jill Allor, SMU, reading, intellectual disabilityLow IQ students learn to read at 1st-grade level after persistent, intensive instruction
    Anogla, Africa, South Atlantic, fossil, coast, SMU, StrganacRichest marine reptile fossil bed along Africa’s South Atlantic coast is dated at 71.5 mya
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    Gamma-ray bursts are believed to be the catastrophic collapse of a star at the end of its life. SMU physicists report that their telescope was the first on the ground to observe the burst and to capture an image.

    Recorded as GRB 140419A by NASA’s Gamma-ray Coordinates Network, the burst was spotted at 11 p.m. April 19 by SMU’s robotic telescope at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas.

    CBS News reporter Hani Shawwa reported the news in his article “See an exploding star from 12 billion years ago.”

    Read the full story.

    EXCERPT:

    By Hani Shawwa
    CBS News

    It took billions of years for the light of this cosmic explosion to reach Earth, and now it’s offering scientists a rare glimpse of the universe at one of its earliest stages.

    A McDonald Observatory telescope in Fort Davis, Texas captured the image of a gamma-ray burst — the enormous explosion of a star, which took place more than 12 billion years ago, shortly after the Big Bang.

    “Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the universe since the Big Bang. These bursts release more energy in 10 seconds than our Earth’s sun during its entire expected lifespan of 10 billion years,” said Farley Ferrante, a graduate student at Southern Methodist University’s Department of Physics, who monitored the explosion along with two astronomers in Turkey and Hawaii.

    The phenomenon is not well understood by astronomers, but it is believed to be the result of a catastrophic collapse of a star at the end of its life.

    “Gamma-ray bursts may be particularly massive cousins to supernovae… By studying them, we learn about supernovae,” said Robert Kehoe, physics professor and leader of the SMU astronomy team.

    The photo was snapped in mid-April and released this week.

    Scientists weren’t able to detect optical light from gamma-ray bursts until the late 1990s, when telescope technology improved.

    Among all lights in the electromagnetic spectrum, gamma rays have the shortest wavelengths and are visible only using special detectors.

    Read the full story.

    Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter.

    For more information, www.smuresearch.com.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    Earth & Climate Energy & Matter Researcher news SMU In The News

    Daily Mail: Huge 12 billion-year-old explosion in space has been spotted from Earth – and it could reveal secrets of the early universe

    Armed with images of the burst, astronomers can now analyze the data in order to understand more about the structure of the universe at its infancy

    The U.K.’s widely read newspaper the Daily Mail covered the astronomy research of physicist Robert Kehoe, SMU professor, and two graduate students in the SMU Department of Physics, Farley Ferrante and Govinda Dhungana.

    The astronomy team in May reported observation of intense light from the enormous explosion of a star more than 12 billion years ago — shortly after the Big Bang — that recently reached Earth and was visible in the sky.

    Known as a gamma-ray burst, light from the rare, high-energy explosion traveled for 12.1 billion years before it was detected and observed by a telescope, ROTSE-IIIb, owned by SMU.
    Gamma-ray bursts are believed to be the catastrophic collapse of a star at the end of its life. SMU physicists report that their telescope was the first on the ground to observe the burst and to capture an image.

    Recorded as GRB 140419A by NASA’s Gamma-ray Coordinates Network, the burst was spotted at 11 p.m. April 19 by SMU’s robotic telescope at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas.

    Daily Mail reporter Jonathan O’Callaghan reported the news in his article “Huge 12 billion-year-old explosion in space has been spotted from Earth – and it could reveal secrets of the early universe.”

    Read the full story.

    EXCERPT:

    By Jonathan O’Callaghan
    Daily Mail

    One of the biggest and hottest explosions in the universe – a rare event known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB) – has been spotted on camera.

    And this particular event, caused by the enormous explosions of a star, occurred shortly after the Big Bang about 12.1 billion years ago.

    The intense light recently reached Earth and it could give astronomers useful information about the conditions in the young universe.

    Gamma-ray bursts are believed to be the catastrophic collapse of a star at the end of its life.

    The observation was made by the telescope Rotse-IIIB at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas, owned by the Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas.

    SMU physicists report that their telescope was the first on the ground to observe the burst, and to capture an image.

    This particular explosion, first spotted back in April, was recorded as GRB 140419A by Nasa’s Gamma-ray Coordinates Network (GCN).

    Gamma-ray bursts are not well understood by astronomers, but they are considered important, according to Farley Ferrante, a graduate student in SMU’s Department of Physics, who monitored the observations along with two astronomers in Turkey and Hawaii.

    ‘As Nasa points out, gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the universe since the Big Bang,’ he said.

    ‘These bursts release more energy in 10 seconds than our Earth’s sun during its entire expected lifespan of 10 billion years.’

    Some of these GRBs appear to be related to supernovae and correspond to the end-of-life of a massive star, said Dr Robert Kehoe, physics professor and leader of the SMU astronomy team.

    ‘Gamma-ray bursts may be particularly massive cousins to supernovae, or may correspond to cases in which the explosion ejecta are more beamed in our direction. By studying them, we learn about supernovae,’ Kehoe said.

    Read the full story.

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    Observed by Texas telescope: Light from huge explosion 12 billion years ago reaches Earth

    Known as a gamma-ray burst, the intense light captured in the night sky resulted from one of the biggest and hottest explosions in the universe, occurring shortly after the Big Bang.

    Intense light from the enormous explosion of a star more than 12 billion years ago — shortly after the Big Bang — recently reached Earth and was visible in the sky.

    Known as a gamma-ray burst, light from the rare, high-energy explosion traveled for 12.1 billion years before it was detected and observed by a telescope, ROTSE-IIIb, owned by Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

    Gamma-ray bursts are believed to be the catastrophic collapse of a star at the end of its life. SMU physicists report that their telescope was the first on the ground to observe the burst and to capture an image, said Farley Ferrante, a graduate student in SMU’s Department of Physics, who monitored the observations along with two astronomers in Turkey and Hawaii.

    Recorded as GRB 140419A by NASA’s Gamma-ray Coordinates Network, the burst was spotted at 11 p.m. April 19 by SMU’s robotic telescope at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas.

    Gamma-ray burst 1404191 was spotted at 11 p.m. on April 19 by SMU's robotic ROTSE-IIIb telescope at McDonald Observatory, Fort Davis, Texas.
    Gamma-ray burst 1404191 was spotted at 11 p.m. April 19 by SMU’s robotic ROTSE-IIIb telescope at McDonald Observatory, Fort Davis, Texas.

    Gamma-ray bursts are not well understood by astronomers, but they are considered important, Ferrante said.

    “As NASA points out, gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the universe since the Big Bang,” he said. “These bursts release more energy in 10 seconds than our Earth’s sun during its entire expected lifespan of 10 billion years.”

    Some of these gamma-ray bursts appear to be related to supernovae, and correspond to the end-of-life of a massive star, said Robert Kehoe, physics professor and leader of the SMU astronomy team.

    “Gamma-ray bursts may be particularly massive cousins to supernovae, or may correspond to cases in which the explosion ejecta are more beamed in our direction. By studying them, we learn about supernovae,” Kehoe said.

    Scientists weren’t able to detect optical light from gamma-ray bursts until the late 1990s, when telescope technology improved. Among all lights in the electromagnetic spectrum, gamma rays have the shortest wavelengths and are visible only using special detectors.

    Gamma-ray bursts result from hot stars that measure as enormous as 50 solar masses. The explosion occurs when the stars run out of fuel and collapse in on themselves, forming black holes.

    The ROTSE-IIIb robotic telescope at McDonald Observatory, Fort Davis, Texas. (Photo: McDonald Observatory)
    The ROTSE-IIIb robotic telescope at McDonald Observatory, Fort Davis, Texas. (Photo: McDonald Observatory)

    Outer layers detonate, shooting out material along the rotation axis in powerful, high-energy jets that include gamma radiation.

    As the gamma radiation declines, the explosion produces an afterglow of visible optical light. The light, in turn, fades very quickly, said Kehoe. Physicists calculate the distance of the explosion based on the shifting wavelength of the light, or redshift.

    “The optical light is visible for anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours,” Kehoe said. “Sometimes optical telescopes can capture the spectra. This allows us to calculate the redshift of the light, which tells us how fast the light is moving away from us. This is an indirect indication of the distance from us.”

    Observational data from gamma-ray bursts allows scientists to understand structure of the early universe
    To put into context the age of the new gamma-ray burst discoveries, Kehoe and Ferrante point out that the Big Bang occurred 13.81 billion years ago. GRB 140419A is at a red shift of 3.96, Ferrante said.

    “That means that GRB 140419A exploded about 12.1 billion years ago,” he said, “which is only about one-and-a-half billion years after the universe began. That is really old.”

    Armed with images of the burst, astronomers can analyze the observational data to draw further conclusions about the structure of the early universe.

    “At the time of this gamma-ray burst’s explosion, the universe looked vastly different than it does now,” Kehoe said. “It was an early stage of galaxy formation. There weren’t heavy elements to make Earth-like planets. So this is a glimpse at the early universe. Observing gamma-ray bursts is important for gaining information about the early universe.”

    GRB 140419A’s brightness, measured by its ability to be seen by someone on Earth, was of the 12th magnitude, Kehoe said, indicating it was only 10 times dimmer than what is visible through binoculars, and only 200 times dimmer than the human eye can see, Kehoe said.

    “The difference in brightness is about the same as between the brightest star you can see in the sky, and the dimmest you can see with the naked eye on a clear, dark night,” Kehoe said. “Considering this thing was at the edge of the visible universe, that’s an extreme explosion. That was something big. Really big.”

    SMU telescope responded to NASA satellite’s detection and notification
    SMU’s Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE) IIIb is a robotic telescope. It is part of a network of ground telescopes responsive to a NASA satellite that is central to the space agency’s Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission. Images of the gamma-ray bursts are at http://bit.ly/1kKZeh5.

    When the Swift satellite detects a gamma-ray burst, it instantly relays the location. Telescopes around the world, such as SMU’s ROTSE-IIIb, swing into action to observe the burst’s afterglow and capture images, said Govinda Dhungana, an SMU graduate student who participated in the gamma-ray burst research.

    SMU’s ROTSE-IIIb observes optical emission from several gamma-ray bursts each year. It observed GRB 140419A just 55 seconds after the burst was detected by Swift.

    Just days later, ROTSE-IIIb observed and reported a second rare and distant gamma-ray burst, GRB 140423A, at 3:30 a.m. April 23. The redshift of that burst corresponds to a look back in time of 11.8 billion years. ROTSE-IIIb observed it 51 seconds after the burst was detected by Swift.

    “We have the brightest detection and the earliest response on both of those because our telescope is fully robotic and no human hands were involved,” Ferrante said.

    Ferrante, the first to check observations on GRB 140423A, is first-author on that gamma-ray burst. Tolga Guver, associate professor in the Department of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Istanbul University, Turkey, is second author. On GRB 140419A, Guver is first author and Ferrante is second.

    The research is funded by the Texas Space Grant Consortium, an affiliate of NASA. — Margaret Allen

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    Search for dark matter covers new ground with CDMS experiment in Minnesota

    Scientists report the Cryogenic Dark Matter Experiment has set more stringent limits on light dark matter

    CDMS Dark matter, Jodi Cooley, SMU

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    Scientists hunting for dark matter announced Friday they’ve now been able to probe the dark matter mass and cross section in a region that no other experiment has been able to explore.

    Dark matter has never been detected, but scientists believe it constitutes a large part of our universe. Key to finding dark matter is determining its mass, or the volume of matter it contains.

    On Friday, scientists with CDMS, a dark matter experiment that operates a particle detector in an abandoned underground mine in northern Minnesota, said they’ve narrowed the possibilities for dark matter’s mass.

    The CDMS experiment searches for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which some physicists theorize constitutes dark matter. WIMPS are particles of such low mass that they rarely interact with ordinary matter, making them extremely difficult to detect, said physicist Jodi Cooley, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and a member of the experiment.

    CDMS scientists say they’ve narrowed the range of measurements in which dark matter’s mass might occur.

    “This new result is sensitive to WIMPs of lower mass than previous experiments have been able to attempt to measure,” Cooley said.

    The result, however, conflicts with results from another experiment that is also hunting for dark matter. A handful of experiments around the world are using different techniques to solve the question.

    “It’s not enough for one technique and one experiment to say they’ve made a discovery. It always has to be verified and looked at by another experiment, independently, with a different technique,” Cooley said. “If different techniques and different instruments prove the finding, then you can have a lot more confidence in the result.”

    SMU graduate student Bedile Kara worked on the CDMS analysis. Kara performed the data processing and developed data quality and particle identification criteria used for the result.

    Dark matter makes up the bulk of the universe, but know one has seen it
    Scientists looking for dark matter face a serious challenge: No one knows what dark matter particles look like. So their search covers a wide range of possible traits — different masses, different probabilities of interacting with regular matter.

    Scientists on the CDMS, which stands for Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, announced they have shifted the border of the search down to a dark-matter particle mass and rate of interaction that has never been probed.

    “We’re pushing CDMS to as low mass as we can,” says physicist Dan Bauer, the project manager for CDMS at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory near Chicago. “We’re proving the particle detector technology here.”

    The CDMS result does not claim any hints of dark matter particles. But it contradicts a result announced in January by another dark matter experiment, CoGeNT, which uses particle detectors made of germanium, the same detector material used by CDMS.

    To search for dark matter, CDMS scientists cool their detectors to very low temperatures to detect the very small energies deposited by the collisions of dark matter particles with the germanium. They operate their detectors half a mile underground in an abandoned iron ore mine in northern Minnesota. The mine provides shielding from cosmic rays that could clutter the detector as it waits for passing dark matter particles.

    Dark matter experiments attempt to understand dark matter despite background noise
    Friday’s result carves out interesting new dark matter territory for masses below six GeV, a unit of energy for measuring subatomic particles. The dark matter experiment Large Underground Xenon, or LUX, recently ruled out a wide range of masses and interaction rates above that with the announcement of its first result in October 2013.

    Scientists have expressed an increasing amount of interest of late in the search for low-mass dark matter particles, with CDMS and three other experiments — DAMA, CoGeNT and CRESST — all finding their data compatible with the existence of dark matter particles between five and 20 GeV. But such light dark-matter particles are hard to pin down. The lower the mass of the dark-matter particles, the less energy they leave in detectors, and the more likely it is that background noise will drown out any signals.

    Even more confounding is the fact that scientists don’t know whether dark matter particles interact in the same way in detectors built with different materials to search for dark matter in more than a dozen experiments around the world.

    “It’s important to look in as many materials as possible to try to understand whether dark matter interacts in this more complicated way,” says Adam Anderson, a graduate student at MIT who worked on the latest CDMS analysis as part of his thesis. “Some materials might have very weak interactions. If you only picked one, you might miss it.”

    Scientists around the world seem to be taking that advice, building different types of detectors and constantly improving their methods.

    “Progress is extremely fast,” Anderson says. “The sensitivity of these experiments is increasing by an order of magnitude every few years.”

    Elusive dark matter — the “glue” that represents 85 percent of the matter in our universe — has never been observed. Cooley in 2012 was recognized by the National Science Foundation with its prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award. The NSF awarded Cooley a 5-year, $1 million research grant toward her CDMS dark matter research. — Margaret Allen, SMU, and Kathryn Jepsen, Fermilab

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    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    SMU Daily Campus: Navigating neutrinos — Professor studies most elusive particle in the universe

    Thomas Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics, works with more than 200 scientists around the world to study one of the universe's most elusive particles — the neutrino. (Photo: Ellen Smith, The Daily Campus)
    Thomas Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics, works with more than 200 scientists around the world to study one of the universe’s most elusive particles — the neutrino.
    (Photo: Ellen Smith, The Daily Campus)

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    Journalist Lauren Aguirre of the SMU Daily Campus covered the research of SMU physicist Thomas E. Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics.

    Coan collaborates with more than 200 scientists around the world to study one of the universe’s most elusive particles — the neutrino.

    Neutrinos could yield crucial information about the early moments of the universe, according to Coan and other scientists on the NOvA experiment, which will gather data from a detector in Minnesota.

    “Neutrinos are fascinating. They are, besides light, the most numerous particle in the universe yet are notoriously difficult to study since they interact with the rest of matter so feebly,” he said. “Produced in many venues, from laboratories to stars and even bones, they may be their own anti-particles and perhaps play a key role in explaining why any matter at all exists today and survived annihilation with its sister anti-matter produced all the way back in the Big Bang, many billions of years ago.”

    The NUMI Off-Axis electron neutrino Appearance, or NOvA, is the world’s longest-distance neutrino experiment. It consists of two huge particle detectors placed 500 miles apart, and its job is to explore the properties of an intense beam of neutrinos.

    The Daily Campus article published Feb. 27, “Navigating neutrinos: Professor studies most elusive particle in the universe.”

    Read the full story.

    EXCERPT:

    By Lauren Aguirre
    The Daily Campus
    Thomas Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics, is working with over 200 scientists from around the world to study one of the universe’s most elusive particles — the neutrino.

    Neutrinos are one of the most abundant particles in the universe, but are hard to detect because they rarely interact with other particles. The NuMI Off-Axis electron neutrino Appearance, or NOvA, experiment may explain the makeup of the universe.

    “Neutrinos play a key role in explaining why anti-matter still exists,” Coan said.

    Anti-matter are particles that have the same mass as ordinary matter people are familiar with, but anti-matter has opposite charges. When matter and anti-matter collide, they annihilate each other. According to the NOvA experiment website, studying neutrinos can help explain why the universe has more matter than anti-matter. Because humans are made of regular matter, understanding the balance between these two particles can explain why humans exist.

    “By understanding these fundamental questions, we can get down to the fundamental levels of how the universe works,” said Brian Rebel, a staff scientist at Fermilab, the organization that is managing NOvA.

    Coan started working at SMU in 1994 and joined the NOvA collaboration in 2005.

    Read the full story.

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    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    NOvA experiment glimpses neutrinos, one of nature’s most abundant, and elusive particles

    Ghostly particles that constantly bombard us can offer clues to the early moments of our universe

    Scientists hunting one of nature’s most elusive, yet abundant, elementary particles announced today they’ve succeeded in their first efforts to glimpse neutrinos using a detector in Minnesota.

    Neutrinos are generated in nature through the decay of radioactive elements and from high-energy collisions between fundamental particles, such as in the Big Bang that ignited the universe.

    Light and ghostly, however, they are unaffected by magnetic fields and travel at the speed of light.

    The neutrinos that currently bombard the earth from space are mostly produced by the nuclear reactions that power our sun.

    More than 200 physicists from around the world collaborate on the massive neutrino experiment called NOvA, which has taken a decade to design and build.

    Their goal is to discover more details about neutrinos, which were theorized in 1930 and first observed in 1956.

    The NOvA detector viewed from Google earth
    The NOvA detector viewed from Google earth. Click to enlarge.

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    “These first few neutrino events are a confirmation that NOvA’s basic detector design and construction that dozens of people have worked on for a good fraction of a decade are sound,” said Thomas E. Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics, who is a researcher in the NOvA collaboration.

    Studying neutrinos could yield crucial information about the early moments of the universe, Coan said.

    “Neutrinos are fascinating. They are, besides light, the most numerous particle in the universe yet are notoriously difficult to study since they interact with the rest of matter so feebly,” he said. “Produced in many venues, from laboratories to stars and even bones, they may be their own anti-particles and perhaps play a key role in explaining why any matter at all exists today and survived annihilation with its sister anti-matter produced all the way back in the Big Bang, many billions of years ago.”

    NOvA is the world’s longest-distance neutrino experiment
    The NUMI Off-Axis electron neutrino Appearance, or NOvA, is the world’s longest-distance neutrino experiment. It consists of two huge particle detectors placed 500 miles apart, and its job is to explore the properties of an intense beam of neutrinos.

    “NOvA represents a new generation of neutrino experiments,” said Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer. “We are proud to reach this important milestone on our way to learning more about these fundamental particles.”

    Scientists generate a beam of the particles for the NOvA experiment using one of the world’s largest accelerators, located at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago. They aim this beam in the direction of the two particle detectors, one near the source at Fermilab and the other in Ash River, Minn., near the Canadian border. The detector in Ash River is operated by the University of Minnesota under a cooperative agreement with the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

    Billions of those particles are sent through the earth every two seconds, aimed at the massive detectors. Once the experiment is fully operational, scientists will catch a precious few each day.

    “It is both intellectually and emotionally satisfying,” said SMU’s Coan, “akin to a great adventure, to be detecting neutrinos in Northern Minnesota that are produced some 500 miles to the south at Fermi National Laboratory near Chicago, after making thousands of engineering and scientific decisions that had to be spot-on to see these events.”

    Scientists will use NOvA to understand three changing flavors of neutrinos
    Neutrinos are curious particles. They come in three types, called flavors, and change between them as they travel. The two detectors of the NOvA experiment are placed so far apart to give the neutrinos the time to oscillate from one flavor to another while traveling at nearly the speed of light. Even though only a fraction of the experiment’s larger detector, called the far detector, is fully built, filled with scintillator and wired with electronics at this point, the experiment has already used it to record signals from its first neutrinos.

    “That the first neutrinos have been detected even before the NOvA far detector installation is complete is a real tribute to everyone involved,” said University of Minnesota physicist Marvin Marshak, Ash River Laboratory director. “This early result suggests that the NOvA collaboration will make important contributions to our knowledge of these particles in the not so distant future.”

    Once completed, NOvA’s near and far detectors will weigh 300 and 14,000 tons, respectively. Crews will put into place the last module of the far detector early this spring and will finish outfitting both detectors with electronics in the summer.

    The NOvA collaboration is made up of 208 scientists from 38 institutions in the United States, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Greece, India, Russia and the United Kingdom. The experiment receives funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and other funding agencies.

    The NOvA experiment is scheduled to run for six years. Because neutrinos interact with matter so rarely, scientists expect to catch just about 5,000 neutrinos or antineutrinos during that time. Scientists can study the timing, direction and energy of the particles that interact in their detectors to determine whether they came from Fermilab or elsewhere.

    “Seeing neutrinos in the first modules of the detector in Minnesota is a major milestone”
    Fermilab creates a beam of neutrinos by smashing protons into a graphite target, which releases a variety of particles. Scientists use magnets to steer the charged particles that emerge from the energy of the collision into a beam. Some of those particles decay into neutrinos, and the scientists filter the non-neutrinos from the beam.

    Fermilab started sending a beam of neutrinos through the detectors in September, after 16 months of work by about 300 people to upgrade the lab’s accelerator complex.

    Different types of neutrinos have different masses, but scientists do not know how these masses compare to one another. A goal of the NOvA experiment is to determine the order of the neutrino masses, known as the mass hierarchy, which will help scientists narrow their list of possible theories about how neutrinos work.

    “Seeing neutrinos in the first modules of the detector in Minnesota is a major milestone,” said Fermilab physicist Rick Tesarek, deputy project leader for NOvA. “Now we can start doing physics.” — Andre Salles, Fermilab, and Margaret Allen, SMU

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    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

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    SMU physicists celebrate Nobel Prize for discovery of Higgs boson “god particle”

    SMU joins nearly 2,000 physicists from U.S. institutions — including 89 U.S. universities and seven U.S. DOE labs — that participate in discovery experiments

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    SMU’s experimental physics group played a pivotal role in discovering the Higgs boson — the particle that proves the theory for which two scientists have received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.

    The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today awarded the Nobel Prize to theorists Peter W. Higgs and François Englert to recognize their work developing the theory of what is now known as the Higgs field, which gives elementary particles mass. U.S. scientists played a significant role in advancing the theory and in discovering the particle that proves the existence of the Higgs field, the Higgs boson.

    The Nobel citation recognizes Higgs and Englert “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.”

    In the 1960s, Higgs and Englert, along with other theorists, including Robert Brout, Tom Kibble and Americans Carl Hagen and Gerald Guralnik, published papers introducing key concepts in the theory of the Higgs field. In 2012, scientists on the international ATLAS and CMS experiments, performed at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN laboratory in Europe, confirmed this theory when they announced the discovery of the Higgs boson.

    “A scientist may test out a thousand different ideas over the course of a career. If you’re fortunate, you get to experiment with one that works,” says SMU physicist Ryszard Stroynowski, a principal investigator in the search for the Higgs boson. As the leader of an SMU Department of Physics team working on the experiment, Stroynowski served as U.S. coordinator for the ATLAS Experiment’s Liquid Argon Calorimeter, which measures energy from the particles created by proton collisions.

    The University’s experimental physics group has been involved since 1994 and is a major contributor to the research, the heart of which is the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator on the border with Switzerland and France.

    SMU joins nearly 2,000 physicists from U.S. institutions — including 89 U.S. universities and seven U.S. Department of Energy laboratories — that participate in the ATLAS and CMS experiments, making up about 23 percent of the ATLAS collaboration and 33 percent of CMS at the time of the Higgs discovery. Brookhaven National Laboratory serves as the U.S. hub for the ATLAS experiment, and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory serves as the U.S. hub for the CMS experiment. U.S. scientists provided a significant portion of the intellectual leadership on Higgs analysis teams for both experiments.

    Preliminary discovery results were announced July 4, 2012 at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland, and at the International Conference of High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia.

    “It is an honor that the Nobel Committee recognizes these theorists for their role in predicting what is one of the biggest discoveries in particle physics in the last few decades,” said Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer. “I congratulate the whole particle physics community for this achievement.”

    The majority of U.S. scientists participating in LHC experiments work primarily from their home institutions, remotely accessing and analyzing data through high-capacity networks and grid computing. The United States plays an important role in this distributed computing system, providing 23 percent of the computing power for ATLAS and 40 percent for CMS. The United States also supplied or played a leading role in several main components of the two detectors and the LHC accelerator, amounting to a value of $164 million for the ATLAS detector, $167 million for the CMS detector, and $200 million for the LHC. Support for the U.S. effort comes from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

    “It’s wonderful to see a 50-year-old theory confirmed after decades of hard work and remarkable ingenuity,” said Brookhaven National Laboratory Director Doon Gibbs. “The U.S. has played a key role, contributing scientific and technical expertise along with essential computing and data analysis capabilities — all of which were necessary to bring the Higgs out of hiding. It’s a privilege to share in the success of an experiment that has changed the face of science.”

    The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN was the culmination of decades of effort by physicists and engineers around the world, at the LHC but also at other accelerators such as the Tevatron accelerator, located at Fermilab, and the Large Electron Positron accelerator, which once inhabited the tunnel where the LHC resides. Work by scientists at the Tevatron and LEP developed search techniques and eliminated a significant fraction of the space in which the Higgs boson could hide.

    Several contributors from SMU have made their mark on the project at various stages, including current Department of Physics faculty members Ryszard Stroynowski, Jingbo Ye, Robert Kehoe and Stephen Sekula. Faculty members Pavel Nadolsky and Fred Olness performed theoretical calculations used in various aspects of data analysis.

    University postdoctoral fellows on the ATLAS Experiment have included Julia Hoffmann, David Joffe, Ana Firan, Haleh Hadavand, Peter Renkel, Aidan Randle-Conde and Daniel Goldin.

    SMU has awarded eight Ph.D. and seven M.Sc. degrees to students who performed advanced work on ATLAS, including Ryan Rios, Rozmin Daya, Renat Ishmukhametov, Tingting Cao, Kamile Dindar, Pavel Zarzhitsky and Azzedin Kasmi.

    Significant contributions to ATLAS have also been made by SMU faculty members in the Department of Physics’ Optoelectronics Lab, including Tiankuan Liu, Annie Xiang and Datao Gong.

    “The discovery of the Higgs is a great achievement, confirming an idea that will require rewriting of the textbooks,” Stroynowski says. “But there is much more to be learned from the LHC and from ATLAS data in the next few years. We look forward to continuing this work.”

    Higgs and Englert published their papers independently and did not meet in person until the July 4, 2012, announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN. Higgs, 84, is a professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Englert, 80, is a professor emeritus at Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.

    The prize was announced at 5:45 a.m. CDT on Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2013.

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    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

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    NOvA neutrino detector in Minnesota records first 3-D particle tracks in search to understand universe

    The NOvA detector, currently under construction in Ash River, Minn., stands about 50 feet tall and 50 feet wide. The completed detector will weigh 14,000 tons. (Credit: Fermilab)
    The NOvA detector, currently under construction in Ash River, Minn., stands about 50 feet tall and 50 feet wide. The completed detector will weigh 14,000 tons. (Credit: Fermilab)

    What will soon be the most powerful neutrino detector in the United States has recorded its first three-dimensional images of particles.

    Using the first completed section of the NOvA neutrino detector under construction in Minnesota, scientists have begun collecting data from cosmic rays—particles produced by a constant rain of atomic nuclei falling on the Earth’s atmosphere from space.

    Scientists’ goal for the completed detector is to use it to discover properties of mysterious fundamental particles called neutrinos.

    Neutrinos are as abundant as cosmic rays in the atmosphere, but they have barely any mass and interact much more rarely with other matter. Many of the neutrinos around today are thought to have originated in the Big Bang when the universe began.

    “These recent tests with the very first portions of our eventual 14,000-ton detector are extremely gratifying since they give us confidence that after many years of work by many people, and innumerable design meetings, our detector is actually becoming alive,” said physicist Thomas E. Coan, an associate professor of physics at Southern Methodist University. “There now seem to be no fundamental show stoppers lurking around.”

    SMU hosted in January the most recent general meeting for the experiment known by the acronym NOvA.

    NOVA-Looking-North-med-1

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    NOva Thomas Coan SMU neutrino To book a live or taped interview with Thomas Coan in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email SMU News at news@smu.edu.

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    “That was the last meeting before these tests were completed and it allowed us to settle details of the tests and make sure they would be crisp and meaningful,” Coan said. “Overall, understanding neutrinos is essential to understanding our universe at a deep level. But studying them is also considerable fun since they are so weird.”

    The active section of the detector, under construction in Ash River, Minn., is about 12 feet long, 15 feet wide and 20 feet tall. The full detector will measure more than 200 feet long, 50 feet wide and 50 feet tall.

    “It’s taken years of hard work and close collaboration among universities, national laboratories and private companies to get to this point,” said Pier Oddone, director of the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Fermilab manages the project to construct the detector.

    “The more we know about neutrinos, the more we know about the early universe and about how our world works at its most basic level,” said NOvA co-spokesperson Gary Feldman of Harvard University.

    “A possible path to understanding why any matter at all is present in our universe — including the matter that comprises us — is to understand the behavior of neutrinos, which are especially mysterious subatomic particles,” said SMU’s Coan.

    “Neutrinos are almost a billion times more numerous in the universe than hydrogen, the universe’s most abundant element. But with a mass more than a million times smaller than an electron’s, the electrically neutral neutrino interacts extraordinarily feebly with matter,” he said. “A common reference scale is that a neutrino needs to travel a distance of a light year through lead before it will interact with another particle. Neutrinos also have the peculiar property that they morph from one type — or “flavor” — to another as they travel.”

    Later this year, Fermilab, outside of Chicago, will start sending a beam of neutrinos 500 miles through the earth to the NOvA detector near the Canadian border. When a neutrino interacts in the NOvA detector, the particles it produces leave trails of light in their wake. The detector records these streams of light, enabling physicists to identify the original neutrino and measure the amount of energy it had.

    “The morphing of a muon flavor neutrino to an electron flavor neutrino is particularly interesting,” Coan said, noting that the flavor of a neutrino is determined by what electrically charged particles it produces when it eventually interacts with matter. “An electron neutrino produces electrons while a muon neutrino produces a muon, which is a kind of heavy, radioactive electron.”

    The whole phenomenon of neutrino morphing — called “neutrino flavor oscillation” — is poorly understood, he said, but needs to be if neutrino interactions in the early universe can be sensibly thought to be central to explaining the subsequent absence of antimatter.

    “NOνA will produce large numbers of muon neutrinos in the particle beam. The far detector contains enough target nuclei for the neutrinos to interact with,” Coan said. “The far distance between source and detector allows time for the muon neutrinos to morph into electron neutrinos. NOνA will detect the morphing of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos by detecting the creation of electrons in the far detector. Measuring the frequency of this particular morphing is one important science goal.”

    When cosmic rays pass through the NOvA detector, they leave straight tracks and deposit well-known amounts of energy. They are great for calibration, said Mat Muether, a Fermilab post-doctoral researcher who has been working on the detector.

    “Everybody loves cosmic rays for this reason,” Muether said. “They are simple and abundant and a perfect tool for tuning up a new detector.”

    The detector at its current size catches more than 1,000 cosmic rays per second. Naturally occurring neutrinos from cosmic rays, supernovae and the sun stream through the detector at the same time. But the flood of more visible cosmic ray data makes it difficult to pick them out.

    Once the upgraded Fermilab neutrino beam starts later this year, the NOvA detector will take data every 1.3 seconds to synchronize with the Fermilab accelerator. Inside this short time window, the burst of neutrinos from Fermilab will be much easier to spot.

    The NOvA detector will be operated by the University of Minnesota under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

    The NOvA experiment is a collaboration of 180 scientists, technicians and students from 20 universities and laboratories in the U.S and another 14 institutions around the world. The scientists are funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and funding agencies in the Czech Republic, Greece, India, Russia and the United Kingdom.

    Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter.

    For more information, www.smuresearch.com.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    UPI: Cosmic explosions give dark energy clues

    The international news wire service United Press International has covered the SMU Physics Department’s recent supernovae discoveries. The article, “Cosmic explosions give dark energy clues,” was published Feb. 27. Light from two massive stars that exploded hundreds of millions of years ago recently reached Earth, and each event was identified as a supernova by SMU graduate students in the physics department.

    Both supernovae were spotted with the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment‘s robotic telescope ROTSE3b, which is now operated by SMU graduate students. ROTSE3b is at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas near Fort Davis.

    The Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams of the International Astronomical Union officially designated the discoveries as Supernova 2013X and Supernova 2012ha.

    Book a live interview

    To book a live or taped interview with Robert Kehoe in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

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    Ferrante and Dhungana made both discoveries as part of an international collaboration of physicists from nine universities. Everest and Sherpa were discovered with a fully automated, remotely controlled robotic telescope at the University of Texas’ McDonald Observatory. The discovery is a first for the SMU collaboration members.

    See the article.

    EXCERPT:

    DALLAS, Feb. 27 (UPI) — Light from exploding stars is improving the astronomical “yardstick” used to calculate the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, U.S. scientists say.

    The light from two supernovae, massive stars that exploded hundreds of millions of years ago, has recently reached Earth, Southern Methodist University researchers said.

    A supernova discovered Feb. 6 exploded about 450 million years ago, while a second supernova discovered Nov. 20 exploded about 230 million years ago, Farley Ferrante, an SMU graduate student who made the initial Feb. 6 observation, said.

    Both are Type 1a supernovae, the result of white dwarf explosions, he said.

    “We call these Type 1a supernovae standard candles,” Ferrante said. “Since Type 1a supernovae begin from this standard process, their intrinsic brightness is very similar. So they become a device by which scientists can measure cosmic distance.”

    Type 1a supernova provide astronomers with indirect information about dark energy, which makes up 73 percent of the mass-energy in the universe and is theorized as being responsible for the accelerating expansion of our universe at various times after the Big Bang.

    “Every exploding star observed allows astronomers to more precisely calibrate the increasing speed at which our universe is expanding,” Ferrante said. “The older the explosion, the farther away, the closer it was to the Big Bang and the better it helps us understand dark energy.”

    See the article.

    Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter.

    For more information, www.smuresearch.com.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    ANI News: Exploding stars offer clues to dark energy

    The Asian news wire service Asian News International has covered the SMU Physics Department’s recent supernovae discoveries. The article, “Exploding stars offer clues to dark energy,” was published Feb. 28. Light from two massive stars that exploded hundreds of millions of years ago recently reached Earth, and each event was identified as a supernova by SMU graduate students in the physics department.

    Both supernovae were spotted with the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment‘s robotic telescope ROTSE3b, which is now operated by SMU graduate students. ROTSE3b is at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas near Fort Davis.

    The Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams of the International Astronomical Union officially designated the discoveries as Supernova 2013X and Supernova 2012ha.

    Book a live interview

    To book a live or taped interview with Robert Kehoe in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

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    Ferrante and Dhungana made both discoveries as part of an international collaboration of physicists from nine universities. Everest and Sherpa were discovered with a fully automated, remotely controlled robotic telescope at the University of Texas’ McDonald Observatory. The discovery is a first for the SMU collaboration members.

    Read the full article.

    EXCERPT:

    Washington, February 28 (ANI): Observation of two bright exploding stars is improving the astronomical “tape measure” used to calculate the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, say scientists.

    Light from two massive stars that exploded hundreds of millions of years ago recently reached Earth, and each event was identified as a supernova, Southern Methodist University scientists said.

    A supernova discovered Feb. 6 exploded about 450 million years ago, said Farley Ferrante, a graduate student at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, who made the initial observation.

    The exploding star is in a relatively empty portion of the sky labeled “anonymous” in the faint constellation Canes Venatici. Home to a handful of galaxies, Canes Venatici is near the constellation Ursa Major , best known for the Big Dipper.

    A second supernova discovered Nov. 20 exploded about 230 million years ago, said Ferrante, who made the initial observation. That exploding star is in one of the many galaxies of the Virgo constellation.

    Both supernovae were spotted with the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment’s robotic telescope ROTSE3b, which is now operated by SMU graduate students. ROTSE3b is at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas near Fort Davis.

    The supernova that exploded about 450 million years ago is officially designated Supernova 2013X. It occurred when life on Earth consisted of creatures in the seas and oceans and along coastlines. Following naming conventions for supernova, Supernova 2013X was nicknamed “Everest” by Govinda Dhungana, an SMU graduate student who participated in the discovery.

    The supernova that exploded about 230 million years ago is officially designated Supernova 2012ha. The light from that explosion has been en route to Earth since the Triassic geologic period, when dinosaurs roamed the planet.

    “That’s fairly recent as these explosions go,” Ferrante said.

    Dhungana gave the nickname “Sherpa” to Supernova 2012ha.

    Everest and Sherpa are two of about 200 supernovae discovered worldwide in a given year, according to the scientists.

    “Everest and Sherpa aren’t noteworthy for being the youngest, oldest, closest, furthest or biggest supernovae ever observed. But both, like other supernovae of their kind, are important because they provide us with information for further science,” Ferrante said.

    Read the full article.

    Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter.

    For more information, www.smuresearch.com.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    redOrbit: Astronomers Discover White Dwarf Supernovae

    The news web site redOrbit has covered the SMU Physics Department’s recent supernovae discoveries. The article, “Astronomers Discover White Dwarf Supernovae,” was published Feb. 27. Light from two massive stars that exploded hundreds of millions of years ago recently reached Earth, and each event was identified as a supernova by SMU graduate students in the physics department.

    Both supernovae were spotted with the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment‘s robotic telescope ROTSE3b, which is now operated by SMU graduate students. ROTSE3b is at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas near Fort Davis.

    The Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams of the International Astronomical Union officially designated the discoveries as Supernova 2013X and Supernova 2012ha.

    Book a live interview

    To book a live or taped interview with Robert Kehoe in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

    Related links

    More SMU Research news

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    Ferrante and Dhungana made both discoveries as part of an international collaboration of physicists from nine universities. Everest and Sherpa were discovered with a fully automated, remotely controlled robotic telescope at the University of Texas’ McDonald Observatory. The discovery is a first for the SMU collaboration members.

    Read the full article.

    EXCERPT:

    By Lee Rannals
    redOrbit.com
    White dwarf supernovae that occurred millions of years ago have popped up in the Virgo Cluster galaxy and part of the sky labelled as “anonymous.”

    Southern Methodist University (SMU) researchers say they’ve confirmed two bright stars that showed up in our skies in February and November are supernovae. Supernovae are the result of stars that have reached the end of their life, resulting in a large explosion that can consume anything in its path.

    In November, Farley Ferrante, a graduate student at SMU, made the initial observation of a supernova, Supernova 2012ha or “Sherpa,” that derived from the Virgo constellation, about 230 million light years away. Another supernova, Supernova 2013X or “Everest,” was discovered on February 6, sitting 450 million years away in a part of the sky labeled “animus” near the faint constellation Canes Venatici.

    “Everest and Sherpa aren’t noteworthy for being the youngest, oldest, closest, furthest or biggest supernovae ever observed,” Ferrante said. “But both, like other supernovae of their kind, are important because they provide us with information for further science.”

    Both supernovae are considered Type 1a, which are the result of white dwarf explosions. A white dwarf star has a mass comparable to that of the Sun and its core is a comparable size to that of the Earth. According to Robert Kehoe, physics professor and leader of the SMU astronomy team in the SMU Department of Physics, a teaspoon of a white dwarf star would weigh about as much as Mount Everest.

    When a white dwarf heads towards the end of its life, it grows to about one and a half times the size of the sun and eventually collapses and explodes, resulting in a Type 1a supernova.

    “We call these Type 1a supernovae standard candles,” Ferrante said. “Since Type 1a supernovae begin from this standard process, their intrinsic brightness is very similar. So they become a device by which scientists can measure cosmic distance. From Earth, we measure the light intensity of the exploded star. As star distances from Earth increase, their brilliance diminishes.”

    Read the full article.

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    For more information, www.smuresearch.com.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    White dwarf supernovae are discovered in Virgo Cluster galaxy and in sky area “anonymous”

    Observation of two bright exploding stars improves the astronomical “tape measure” that scientists use to calculate the acceleration of the expansion of the universe

    Light from two massive stars that exploded hundreds of millions of years ago recently reached Earth, and each event was identified as a supernova.

    A supernova discovered Feb. 6 exploded about 450 million years ago, said Farley Ferrante, a graduate student at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, who made the initial observation.

    The exploding star is in a relatively empty portion of the sky labeled “anonymous” in the faint constellation Canes Venatici. Home to a handful of galaxies, Canes Venatici is near the constellation Ursa Major, best known for the Big Dipper.

    Book a live interview

    To book a live or taped interview with Robert Kehoe in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

    Related links

    More SMU Research news

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    Study finds Jurassic ecosystems were similar to modern: Animals flourish among lush plants
    SMU contributes fossils, expertise to new Perot Museum in ongoing scientific collaboration
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    Academic achievement improved among students active in structured after-school programs
    Texas frontier scientists who uncovered state’s fossil history had role in epic Bone Wars
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    A second supernova discovered Nov. 20 exploded about 230 million years ago, said Ferrante, who made the initial observation. That exploding star is in one of the many galaxies of the Virgo constellation.

    Both supernovae were spotted with the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment‘s robotic telescope ROTSE3b, which is now operated by SMU graduate students. ROTSE3b is at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas near Fort Davis.

    The supernova that exploded about 450 million years ago is officially designated Supernova 2013X. It occurred when life on Earth consisted of creatures in the seas and oceans and along coastlines. Following naming conventions for supernova, Supernova 2013X was nicknamed “Everest” by Govinda Dhungana, an SMU graduate student who participated in the discovery.

    The supernova that exploded about 230 million years ago is officially designated Supernova 2012ha. The light from that explosion has been en route to Earth since the Triassic geologic period, when dinosaurs roamed the planet. “That’s fairly recent as these explosions go,” Ferrante said. Dhungana gave the nickname “Sherpa” to Supernova 2012ha.

    Type 1a supernovae help measure cosmic distances
    Everest and Sherpa are two of about 200 supernovae discovered worldwide in a given year. Before telescopes, supernovae observations were rare — sometimes only several every few centuries, according to the scientists.

    “Everest and Sherpa aren’t noteworthy for being the youngest, oldest, closest, furthest or biggest supernovae ever observed,” Ferrante said. “But both, like other supernovae of their kind, are important because they provide us with information for further science.”

    Everest and Sherpa are Type 1a supernovae, the result of white dwarf explosions, said Robert Kehoe, physics professor and leader of the SMU astronomy team in the SMU Department of Physics.

    The scientists explain that a white dwarf is a dying star that has burned up all its energy. It is about as massive as the Earth’s sun. It’s core is about the size of the Earth. The core is dense, however, and one teaspoon of it weighs as much as Mount Everest, Kehoe said.

    A white dwarf explodes if fusion restarts by tugging material from a nearby star, according to the scientists. The white dwarf grows to about one and a half times the size of the sun. Unable to support its weight, Kehoe said, collapse is rapid, fusion reignites and the white dwarf explodes. The result is a Type 1a supernova.

    “We call these Type 1a supernovae standard candles,” Ferrante said. “Since Type 1a supernovae begin from this standard process, their intrinsic brightness is very similar. So they become a device by which scientists can measure cosmic distance. From Earth, we measure the light intensity of the exploded star. As star distances from Earth increase, their brilliance diminishes.”

    While Sherpa is a standard Type 1a, Everest is peculiar. It exhibits the characteristics of a Type 1a called a 1991T, Ferrante said.

    “Everest is the result of two white dwarfs that collide, then merge,” he said.

    The brightness of Sherpa’s explosion was a magnitude 16, which is far dimmer than can be seen with the naked eye. Everest’s explosion was even dimmer, a magnitude 18.

    For perspective, light travels 5.88 trillion miles in a year. The sun is 93 million miles from Earth, so light from the sun reaches Earth in eight minutes.

    Supernovae help in search to understand mysterious dark energy
    Like other Type 1a supernovae, Everest and Sherpa provide scientists with a tiny piece to the puzzle of one of the greatest mysteries of the universe: What is dark energy?

    Every Type 1a supernova provides astronomers with indirect information about dark energy, which makes up 73 percent of the mass-energy in the universe. It’s theorized that dark energy explains the accelerating expansion of our universe at various epochs after the Big Bang.

    “Every exploding star observed allows astronomers to more precisely calibrate the increasing speed at which our universe is expanding,” Ferrante said. “The older the explosion, the farther away, the closer it was to the Big Bang and the better it helps us understand dark energy.”

    Hobby-Eberly spectrogram confirms discovery of supernovae
    Everest’s discovery was confirmed by a spectrogram obtained Feb. 10 with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, also at McDonald Observatory. Everest is located in a host galaxy identified as 2286144 in the Principal Galaxies Catalog.

    A spectrogram obtained Nov. 29 with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope confirmed Sherpa’s discovery in one of the many galaxies of the Virgo Cluster.

    The Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams of the International Astronomical Union officially designated the discoveries as Supernova 2013X and Supernova 2012ha.

    Ferrante and Dhungana made both discoveries as part of an international collaboration of physicists from nine universities. Everest and Sherpa were discovered with a fully automated, remotely controlled robotic telescope at the University of Texas’ McDonald Observatory. The discovery is a first for the SMU collaboration members.

    The telescope, ROTSE, constantly scans the skies for any significant changes, such as supernovae, novae and variable stars. Data from the telescope are reviewed daily by Ferrante, Dhungana and other scientists on the team, who search for signs of stellar activity.

    Until now, primary responsibility for the management and operation of ROTSE3b was held by the University of Michigan. The SMU team took over that responsibility starting in Fall 2012. The ownership transfer will be completed by summer 2013, said SMU’s Kehoe.

    Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter.

    For more information, www.smuresearch.com.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    Dallas Observer: How Texas Came Within an Atom’s Breadth of Discovering the God Particle

    The Dallas Observer interviewed SMU physicist Ryszard Stroynowski about Texas’ historic role in particle physics before the landmark discovery announced in July of the new fundamental “God particle” necessary for scientists to explain how matter acquires mass.

    The Dallas Observer article, “How Texas Came Within an Atom’s Breadth of Discovering the God Particle,” published Aug. 15.

    SMU physicist Stroynowski is a principal investigator in the search for the Higgs boson, and the leader of SMU’s team in the Department of Physics that is working on the experiment.

    The experimental physics group at SMU has been involved since 1994 and is a major contributor to the research, the heart of which is the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator on the border with Switzerland and France.

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    More SMU Research news

    Observed! SMU’s LHC physicists confirm new particle; Higgs ‘God particle’ opens new frontier of exploration
    SMU physicists at CERN find hints of long sought after Higgs boson — dubbed the fundamental “God” particle
    Dallas Observer: As Physicists Near Discovery of God Particle, A Word With SMU Prof Involved In the Search
    WFAA: Super Collider’s legacy lives on in Switzerland

    The discovery results, which are preliminary, were announced July 4 at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland, and at the International Conference of High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia. CERN is the headquarters for the LHC lab, which is a collaborative experiment involving thousands of scientists worldwide.

    Read the full article.

    EXCERPT:

    By Brantley Hargrove
    Dallas Observer
    Ryszard Stroynowski sat bathed in the pale glow of his laptop screen. At 2 in the morning of Independence Day, as the final, fugitive firecracker reports of the night crackled across a sleeping Dallas, the 65-year-old physicist was wide awake. As he watched the live broadcast in his pajamas, his colleagues at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, the locus of the physics universe, tolled the end of the search for an elusive force that had confounded them for half a century. It was the final puzzle piece in a theory that describes with unfathomable precision the fundamental particles of the universe and the laws they obey.

    This piece, known as the Higgs boson and often referred to in the popular press as “the God particle,” was detected in the largest scientific experiment ever devised. Inside a racetrack-shaped particle accelerator five miles across and spanning the borders of France and Switzerland, researchers had reproduced the first, violent moments of creation. By crossing opposing beams of protons powered by enough electrical current to flash-melt a ton of steel instantaneously, and guided by megalithic magnets ringing the accelerator’s course, researchers induced collisions powerful enough to overcome the elemental forces that bind the proton’s constituents. Out of the flashes of the collisions, they glimpsed the wraith-like field that allowed atoms and molecules, stars and planets, to coalesce out of chaos. What they found helped the shapeless take form.

    “As a layman, I would now say I think we have it,” said a beaming Rolf Heuer, director-general of CERN, to the experimenters, the press and to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.

    Stroynowski, an avuncular man with a smooth pate, a white corona of hair and pale gray eyes, already knew, had known for months. After all, he had crunched the numbers. He led the design and construction of the major component of a detector heavier than an aircraft carrier and as big as the science building at Southern Methodist University, where he teaches. It was called ATLAS, and it found the Higgs.

    Stroynowski knew something else, too, a truth that had irrevocably altered his life, the lives of thousands of physicists and the future of North Texas, if not the state. Once upon a time, a tiny town known for its blackland prairie and cotton fields, just a straight shot south down Interstate 35 from Dallas, was physics’ next frontier. In 1988, Ellis County was selected the winner in a heated nationwide competition to be the site for a particle accelerator that would dwarf the one in Geneva. In size, the leviathan’s circumference would approach D.C.’s Beltway, some 54 miles around; big enough to envelop Waxahachie, and require the extinction of a nearby farming hamlet. The world’s existing accelerators had taken physics as far as they could. The accelerator in Texas, called the Superconducting Super Collider, had the potential to take it further than any theorist could possibly dream, opening doors they could not predict.

    Thousands of physicists from all over the world, including Stroynowski, pulled up stakes and migrated to the North Texas site as though it were Mecca, a holy place where the future of the field lay. They established physics departments at nearby universities and began construction of the Super Collider and the components they had to literally invent as they went along. But in 1993, after more than a decade of work and $2 billion spent, Congress canceled it. Its death rendered stillborn American hegemony in the physics world and drove a host of promising young minds from the field. [ … ]

    Read the full article.

    Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter, http://twitter.com/smuresearch.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smuresearch.com.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the SMU Broadcast Studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    The Telegraph: Cern announcement: after 50 years, the Higgs hunt could be over

    SMU postdoctoral researcher Aidan Randle-Conde, SMU Department of Physics, was quoted by the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph. Randle-Conde was quoted for his commentary on the search for the fundamental particle the Higgs boson and the media frenzy sparked in the days leading up to CERN’s much-anticipated July 4 announcement of a new particle discovery.

    Telegraph science reporter Anjana Ahuja quoted in the July 3 article “Cern announcement: after 50 years, the Higgs hunt could be over.”

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    CBS Channel 11: Long-fought discovery of elusive “God” particle brings joy to SMU physicists

    Observed! SMU’s LHC physicists confirm new particle; Higgs ‘God particle’ opens new frontier of exploration
    “Going Up Alleys” podcast: The Cosmos and the Collider
    Quantum Diaries: Cleaning the world’s biggest machine
    DOE Award: advancing SMU’s link to the God particle
    Dallas Observer: As Physicists Near Discovery of God Particle, A Word With SMU Prof Involved In the Search

    Ahuja quoted a blog post by Randle-Conde published on the popular Quantum Diaries web site, which follows physicists from around the world.

    Randle-Conde is part of the team of SMU researchers at Switzerland-based CERN, the largest high-energy physics experiment in the world. Physicists have been seeking the elusive fundamental particle the Higgs boson since it was theorized in the 1960s. The so-called “God” particle is believed to play a fundamental role in solving the important mystery of how matter acquires mass.

    Thousands of scientists from around the world seek evidence of the Higgs particle through experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The researchers analyze a flood of electronic data streaming from the breakup of speeding protons colliding in the massive particle accelerator.

    Read the full article.

    EXCERPT:

    By Anjana Ahuja
    The Telegraph
    Tomorrow could see one of the most anticipated moments in the history of modern science. In a packed auditorium, scientists at Cern, the European nuclear research institute which operates the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will reveal the latest findings in their hunt for the Higgs boson.

    If they really have found the Higgs, as rumours suggest, this would be a triumph for physics – not merely by providing a finishing touch to the Standard Model, which is the dominant theory of how the universe works at the subatomic level, but by solving the long-standing mystery of why objects have mass, and why some have more than others.

    During the decades of Higgs hunting, there have been many false dawns. What makes tomorrow’s announcement different is primarily its timing. The seminar coincides with the opening of the 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics in Melbourne. This features updated results from two separate experiments at the LHC, which, in December, were showing tantalising glimpses of a Higgs-like particle. The Daily Telegraph has learnt that four out of the five surviving theorists involved in predicting the Higgs boson have chosen to attend the announcement, three in Geneva and one at an event in Westminster. […]

    […] However, Dr Aidan Randle-Conde, a British physicist working on Atlas, argues that rushing things, while good for PR, makes for bad science: “This is the worst thing we could do… The Higgs field was postulated nearly 50 years ago, the LHC was proposed 30 years ago … and we’ve been taking data for about 18 months. We should resist the temptation to get an answer now.”

    Another Cern scientist told me that he had seen “plenty of smiles on the faces of people who really need to sleep. People are very excited about what will happen in the Cern auditorium”. Some scientists have started saying, half-seriously, that they’ll need to camp outside the night before, to guarantee a seat. Significantly, Peter Higgs, the octogenarian University of Edinburgh physicist after whom the boson is named, is flying into Geneva. He had stated a wish to avoid publicity until the Higgs was found. The two theorists with whom Kibble worked, Gerald Guralnik and Carl Hagen, will also be present, the first time either has gone to the Swiss city for an update on LHC.

    Read the full article.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    NatGeo: “God Particle” Found? “Historic Milestone” From Higgs Boson Hunters

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    CBS Channel 11: Long-fought discovery of elusive “God” particle brings joy to SMU physicists

    Observed! SMU’s LHC physicists confirm new particle; Higgs ‘God particle’ opens new frontier of exploration
    Dallas Observer: Has the God Particle Been Found?
    SMU physicists at CERN find hints of long sought after Higgs boson — dubbed the fundamental “God” particle
    DOE Award: advancing SMU’s link to the God particle
    Dallas Observer: As Physicists Near Discovery of God Particle, A Word With SMU Prof Involved In the Search
    WFAA: Super Collider’s legacy lives on in Switzerland

    National Geographic News science reporter Ker Than interviewed SMU physicist Ryszard Stroynowski about the historic discovery of the new fundamental particle necessary for scientists to explain how matter acquires mass.

    The National Geographic article, ““God Particle” Found? “Historic Milestone” From Higgs Boson Hunters,” published July 4.

    SMU physicist Stroynowski is a principal investigator in the search for the Higgs boson, and the leader of SMU’s team in the Department of Physics that is working on the experiment.

    The experimental physics group at SMU has been involved since 1994 and is a major contributor to the research, the heart of which is the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator on the border with Switzerland and France.

    The discovery results, which are preliminary, were announced July 4 at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland, and at the International Conference of High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia. CERN is the headquarters for the LHC lab, which is a collaborative experiment involving thousands of scientists worldwide.

    Read the full article.

    EXCERPT:

    By Ker Than
    National Geographic
    “I think we have it. You agree?”

    Speaking to a packed audience Wednesday morning in Geneva, CERN director general Rolf Heuer confirmed that two separate teams working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are more than 99 percent certain they’ve discovered the Higgs boson, aka the God particle—or at the least a brand-new particle exactly where they expected the Higgs to be.

    The long-sought particle may complete the standard model of physics by explaining why objects in our universe have mass—and in so doing, why galaxies, planets, and even humans have any right to exist.

    “We have a discovery,” Heuer said at the seminar. “We have observed a new particle consistent with a Higgs boson.”

    At the meeting were four theorists who helped develop the Higgs theory in the 1960s, including Peter Higgs himself, who could be seen wiping away tears as the announcement was made.

    Although preliminary, the results show a so-called five-sigma of significance, which means that there is only a one in a million chance that the Higgs-like signal the teams observed is a statistical fluke.

    “It’s a tremendous and exciting time,” said physicist Michael Tuts, who works with the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) Experiment, one of the two Higgs-seeking LHC projects.

    The Columbia University physicist had organized a wee-hours gathering of physicists and students in the U.S. to watch the announcement, which took place at 9 a.m., Geneva time.

    “This is the payoff. This is what you do it for.”

    The two LHC teams searching for the Higgs—the other being the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) project—did so independently. Neither one knew what the other would present this morning.

    “It was interesting that the competing experiment essentially had the same result,” said physicist Ryszard Stroynowski, an ATLAS team member based at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “It provides additional confirmation.”

    CERN head Heuer called today’s announcement a “historic milestone” but cautioned that much work lies ahead as physicists attempt to confirm the newfound particle’s identity and further probe its properties.

    Read the full article.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smuresearch.com.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the SMU Broadcast Studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    DMN: Dallas-area physicists had a hand in discovery of “God particle”

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    Observed! SMU’s LHC physicists confirm new particle; Higgs ‘God particle’ opens new frontier of exploration
    Dallas Observer: Has the God Particle Been Found?
    SMU physicists at CERN find hints of long sought after Higgs boson — dubbed the fundamental “God” particle

    DOE Award: advancing SMU’s link to the God particle

    Dallas Observer: As Physicists Near Discovery of God Particle, A Word With SMU Prof Involved In the Search

    WFAA: Super Collider’s legacy lives on in Switzerland

    The Dallas Morning News interviewed SMU physicist Ryszard Stroynowski about the historic discovery of the new fundamental particle necessary for scientists to explain how matter acquires mass.

    The Morning News article, “Dallas-area physicists had a hand in discovery of “God particle,” published July 4.

    SMU physicist Stroynowski is a principal investigator in the search for the Higgs boson, and the leader of SMU’s team in the Department of Physics that is working on the experiment.

    The experimental physics group at SMU has been involved since 1994 and is a major contributor to the research, the heart of which is the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator on the border with Switzerland and France.

    The discovery results, which are preliminary, were announced July 4 at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland, and at the International Conference of High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia. CERN is the headquarters for the LHC lab, which is a collaborative experiment involving thousands of scientists worldwide.

    Read the full article.

    EXCERPT:

    By Joe Simnacher
    Staff Writer
    Three teams of physicists from North Texas were at the heart of the research that discovered the new subatomic particle announced Wednesday.

    Professors and graduate students from Southern Methodist University, the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Texas at Arlington were all working in Geneva on Wednesday when the identification of the basic building block of the universe was announced.

    “It’s really exciting,” said Dr. Joe Izen, the physics professor leading the UTD team. “I get paid to do this.”

    The North Texas teams were part of ATLAS, one of seven larger experiments designed to detect the subatomic particle.

    The UTD team created and operated the ATLAS pixel detector, “kind of like an 80 million pixel camera, if you will,” Izen said. It detects the paths of charge tracks so they can be traced to their point of origin.

    The SMU team works on the ATLAS liquid argon calorimeter, which measures the energy of photons and electrons.

    Dr. Ryszard Stroynowski, physics professor and leader of the SMU team, said he and his colleagues have spent years in Geneva working with equipment they built in Dallas. Stroynowski recently devoted a one-year sabbatical from SMU to the experiment.

    “The experiment operates 24 hours a day,” Stroynowski said. “It has to be manned in shifts.”

    Read the full article.

    Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter, http://twitter.com/smuresearch.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smuresearch.com.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the SMU Broadcast Studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    CBS Channel 11: Long-fought discovery of elusive “God” particle brings joy to SMU physicists

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    To book a live or taped interview with Ryszard Stroynowski in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

    CBS DFW Channel 11 reporter Jack Fink with KTVT-TV interviewed SMU physicist Ryszard Stroynowski about the historic discovery of the new fundamental particle necessary for scientists to explain how matter acquires mass.

    SMU physicist Stroynowski is a principal investigator in the search for the Higgs boson, and the leader of SMU’s team in the Department of Physics that is working on the experiment.

    The experimental physics group at SMU has been involved since 1994 and is a major contributor to the research, the heart of which is the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator on the border with Switzerland and France.

    The discovery results, which are preliminary, were announced July 4 at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland, and at the International Conference of High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia. CERN is the headquarters for the LHC lab, which is a collaborative experiment involving thousands of scientists worldwide.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smuresearch.com.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the SMU Broadcast Studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    Dallas Observer: Has the “God Particle” Been Found? Let’s Ask the SMU Prof Who’s Been Looking.

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    SMU physicists at CERN find hints of long sought after Higgs boson — dubbed the fundamental “God” particle
    CERN scientists find hints of Higgs boson — “God” particle

    DOE Award: advancing SMU’s link to the God particle

    Dallas Observer: As Physicists Near Discovery of God Particle, A Word With SMU Prof Involved In the Search

    Dallas Observer science writer Brantley Hargrove interviewed SMU physicist Ryszard Stroynowski in advance of the announcement from CERN in Geneva about whether scientists have discovered the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle theorized to explain why matter has mass. Stroynowski and other SMU faculty and students have played a role in the recent findings as participants in the experiments.

    Researchers at Switzerland-based CERN, the largest high-energy physics experiment in the world, have been seeking the Higgs boson since it was theorized in the 1960s. The so-called “God” particle is believed to play a fundamental role in solving the important mystery of why matter has mass.

    Read the full article.

    EXCERPT:

    By Brantley Hargrove
    Dallas Observer
    In the early morning hours Wednesday, physicists in Switzerland may announce that they’ve discovered the elusive “God Particle,” aka the Higgs boson.
    For more than half a century, the Higgs has been the theoretical mechanism that imbued matter with mass after the Big Bang, so that the swirling chaos of the universe could coalesce into planets and, eventually, life. Since 1994, Southern Methodist University physics professor Ryszard Stroynowski has been involved in the construction of a device that could detect the presence of the Higgs in the Large Hadron Collider. Back in December, the Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced they’d narrowed their search down to a small range of masses. Reached Tuesday, he was tight-lipped about Wednesday’s announcement.

    “I’m involved with (one of two CERN experiments, known as ATLAS) and I can tell you that we’re confident and that we have enough data to cover whatever statements we’re making,” Stroynowski tells Unfair Park. The wording of that statement, though, will be carefully couched. [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][…]

    […] “It’s like opening a door to a completely new field, so it’s really exciting,” he says. “I have never seen what I call ‘Higgs-teria’ at this level. The amount of interest in the media is something which I have never seen in my entire professional life, over 40 years now.”

    Read the full article.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

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    Fiber-optic data link, now with DOE funding, is critical in the hunt for Big Bang’s “God” particle

    Tiny optoelectronic module plays a key role in the world’s largest physics experiments; new module will be 75 times faster than the current fiber-optic data link on Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS experiment

    The SMU fiber-optic data link (above) was made specifically for ATLAS and its extremely harsh low-temperature, high-radiation environment. More than 1,500 of the data link modules are installed on ATLAS. A second-generation link, which is five times faster but with a smaller footprint, is slated for the next upgrade of the LHC detectors. A planned third-generation data link, being funded by DOE, will be 75 times faster.(Credit: www.smuresearch.com)

    A tiny optoelectronic module designed in part by SMU physicists plays a big role in the world’s largest physics experiment at CERN in Switzerland, where scientists are searching for the “God” particle.

    The module, a fiber-optic transmitter, sends the Large Hadron Collider’s critical raw data from its ATLAS experiment to offsite computer farms. From there, thousands of physicists around the world access the data and analyze it for the long-sought-after particle, the Higgs boson.

    Now as a result of SMU’s role on the LHC data link, SMU Physics Research Professor Annie Xiang has won a three-year research and development grant with $67,500 in support annually from the U.S. Department of Energy to advance the design of the optoelectronic module.

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    The grant calls for a customized multi-channel optical transmitter that can be deployed on many of the world’s high-energy particle detectors.

    Xiang is principal investigator for SMU’s Data Links Group in SMU’s Physics Department, working in the Optoelectronics Lab of Physics Professor Jingbo Ye. She coordinates the lab’s development of optical data transmission systems for particle physics experiments.

    More than 1,500 data link modules are installed on ATLAS
    “We made the first-generation fiber-optic data link specifically for ATLAS and its extremely harsh low-temperature, high-radiation environment,” Xiang said.

    More than 1,500 of the first-generation data link modules are installed on the calorimeter detectors of ATLAS. The link’s job is to reliably offload a continuous flood of raw data without failure or error. Scientists scour the data for signs of the Higgs boson, which has been theorized for decades but never actually observed. It is believed the Higgs gives mass to the matter that we observe.

    A second-generation data link, which SMU also helped design, is slated for deployment in the next upgrade of the LHC in coming years. The current data link installed in ATLAS can transmit up to 1.6 gigabits a second in a single channel, which equates to writing an HD DVD in one minute, Xiang said. The second-generation link, a 5 gigabit transceiver, has a smaller footprint than the current link, but can transmit three times faster and is qualified for even higher radiation. “Many thousands of the second-generation link can be expected across the LHC detectors,” Xiang said.

    The data link being supported by DOE will be even faster. A transmitter only, it will have a transmission capacity of 120 gigabits a second, or 75 times faster than the data link currently installed on ATLAS, Xiang said.

    DOE project will customize off-the-shelf commercial components for on-detector installation
    To design the links, SMU’s team and its collaborators start with qualified commercial transmitters and receivers, then customize them for the LHC detectors, Xiang said. They will repeat that process to develop the data link being supported by DOE.

    Called a “generic” module, the link supported by DOE isn’t specified for any particular detector, but rather will be available to deploy on detectors at the LHC, at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and others.

    The module — a 12-channel transmitter — must be high speed and low footprint, and able to withstand an extremely cold and high-radiation environment, while at the same time maintaining low mass and low power consumption, Xiang said.

    The DOE award is part of a collaborative project with Fermilab, the University of Minnesota, The Ohio State University and Argonne National Laboratory, with a total funding of $900,000. SMU designed the first-generation module in collaboration with Taiwan’s Academia Sinica. SMU collaborated on the second-generation module with CERN, Oxford University and Fermilab.

    Ye and Xiang are members of SMU’s ATLAS team, which is led by SMU Physics Professor Ryszard Stroynowski. — Margaret Allen

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smuresearch.com.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the SMU Broadcast Studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    Dark matter search may turn up evidence of WIMPS: SMU Researcher Q&A

    Radioactivity interferes with our ability to observe dark matter. A banana would be more radioactive than the materials we use for our experiment. — Jodi Cooley

    The XIA Alpha Particle Counter sounds like it belongs in a science fiction movie. In reality it’s housed in a clean room operated by SMU’s Department of Physics, where SMU physicist Jodi Cooley and her students rely on it as part of their search for dark matter.

    Cooley is a member of the global scientific consortium called SuperCryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS). SuperCDMS is searching for elusive dark matter — the “glue” that represents 85 percent of the matter in our universe but which has never been observed.

    SuperCDMS operates a particle detector in an underground abandoned mine in Minnesota. The detector is designed to capture a glimpse of WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), which some physicists theorize constitutes dark matter. WIMPS are particles of such low mass that they rarely interact with ordinary matter, making them extremely difficult to detect.

    Now SuperCDMS plans to build a larger and even more sensitive detector for deployment at SnoLab, an even deeper underground mine near Ontario, Canada. To prepare, Cooley’s team will advance analysis techniques and help determine ultra pure construction materials to increase the detector’s sensitivity to dark matter interactions.

    In testing materials, Cooley’s team measures how much radon or radioactivity occurs as background interference on a sample. SuperCDMS scientists try to minimize background interference to improve the chances of observing WIMPS.

    To assess background, Cooley and her team rely on the high-tech XIA Alpha Particle Counter. SMU is one of only five entities in the world to house the XIA.

    An assistant professor in the SMU Department of Physics, Cooley was recently recognized by the National Science Foundation with its prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award. The NSF awarded Cooley a 5-year, $1 million research grant toward her SuperCDMS dark matter research. Students assisting in the XIA counting include Bedile Karabuga, doctoral student, and Mayisha Nakib, first year.

    What’s the importance of background?
    Cooley:     For people who are older, they’ll remember back before digital TVs to analog TVs. Sometimes you’d turn to a channel and it would be fuzzy, so you’d play with the antenna, play with the contrast. That’s sort of the same thing going on in our detectors.

    We want our detectors to produce a clear image of dark matter. But we have a lot of background or static and fuzz getting in the way. So we have a bag of tricks for removing that static or fuzz to help us see if the dark matter interacts in our detectors.

    Just like the TV, we don’t want to start with a channel that’s completely snow, but a channel that’s sort of coming in. You want to reduce the background as much as possible. That’s what we’re doing with SuperCDMS. So the studies we’re doing are trying to reduce the background around the instrument by selecting ultra pure material with which to construct the instrument.

    The background is from radioactivity, cosmic rays, and just from the fact there are particles around us all the time. So we try to minimize them as much as possible. Even our finger essentially would introduce radioactivity onto our detectors.

    How important are ultra pure materials?
    Cooley:     This is very critical. We’re looking for a very rare occurrence: dark matter interacting in these detectors. Radioactivity interferes with our ability to observe dark matter. The radioactivity in most materials is much higher than the rate of dark matter interactions. So we try to get the purest materials we can find. To describe how pure a material we’re seeking, it helps to know that a banana would be more radioactive. Touching the detectors with our fingers, because our fingers have potassium on them, would ruin the experiment. We’re looking for very trace levels of radioactivity in materials.

    To select the best, we try to count the rate of radioactive decays in materials. Our SuperCDMS collaboration has several types of counters, and different ways and techniques to calculate a material’s radioactivity. Here at SMU in the LUMINA Lab — Laboratory for Ultra Pure Material Isotope and Neutron Assessment — we have the XIA counter, which we’ve named Peruna.

    Where do neutrons enter the picture?
    Cooley:     Neutrons are nearly impossible to distinguish from dark matter in our detectors. They also form background. My postdoctoral researcher Silvia Scorza and SMU graduate student Hang Qiu are both characterizing neutrons that come from the materials. That’s primarily done through simulations. So once we have rates of these types of interactions, we can generate through simulations what this would mean for the experiment. That helps us determine the right materials.

    How does the XIA work?
    Cooley:     The instrument is essentially a drift chamber. We put a material sample on the surface of a tray in the chamber. An electric field goes through the instrument. When the charged particles give off radioactivity in the electric field they drift upward, and then we can measure the energy of the particles and the number of them from any given sample.

    Can that be challenging?
    Cooley:     It’s not trivial. There are subtleties in the instrument. In trying to understand the data and trying to get an accurate count off certain types of materials such as plastics, we have to decide on certain conditions, like how long should the purging process last.

    Why is there more than one dark matter experiment in the world?
    Cooley:     Dark matter is an important question and there are a variety of experiments using different techniques to solve the question. It’s not enough for one technique and one experiment to say they’ve made a discovery. It always has to be verified and looked at by another experiment, independently, with a different technique. If different techniques and different instruments prove the finding, then you can have a lot more confidence in the result. — Margaret Allen

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    Quantum Diaries: Cleaning the world’s biggest machine

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    SMU postdoctoral researcher Aidan Randle-Conde, SMU Department of Physics, posted about his experience working at CERN on the blog Quantum Diaries. His March 6 entry details his thoughts about “Cleaning the world’s biggest machine,” CERN’s Atlas detector.

    Researchers at Switzerland-based CERN, the largest high-energy physics experiment in the world, have been seeking the elusive fundamental particle the Higgs boson since it was theorized in the 1960s. The so-called “God” particle is believed to play a fundamental role in solving the important mystery of why matter has mass.

    Thousands of scientists from around the world seek evidence of the Higgs particle through experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The researchers analyze a flood of electronic data streaming from the breakup of speeding protons colliding in the massive particle accelerator.

    Read Randle-Conde’s Quantum Diaries blog post.

    EXCERPT:

    Our shift starts with a briefing in the control room.

    By Aidan Randle-Conde
    Quantum Diaries
    Tuesday, March 6th, 2012
    Today I spent much of my time crawling around on hands and knees, picking pieces of rubbish from the innards of the ATLAS detector. It’s just one of those things that comes with the job and gives you a different view of the experiment (literally.) Before we start taking data we need to make sure that the ATLAS cavern is clean and safe. I call this process “Grooming the Beast”.

    The ATLAS detector is housed in the ALTAS cavern, just behind the Globe at CERN. The journey down is long (more than 100 meters) and convoluted, with all kinds of doorways, locks, passages and elevators. Work has been taking place in the cavern during the winter shutdown to make improvements and sort out minor problems with the detector. Is a piece of the hardware getting damaged by interactions with matter? This is an excellent time to replace it!

    Some of the team survey the work ahead of them.

    Cleaning the cavern just as people start to leave it may seem like an unusual thing to do, but it serves a very important purpose. There has been a lot of work to improve the detector during the shutdown, and this leaves some debris. The engineers clear up as much as they can as they go along, but the odd screw or piece of wire goes missing, and over the months this builds up. The real danger to the machine is metal debris. The detector contains large magnets and these can interact with metallic objects lying around. They need to be removed before we turn on and take data!

    Read Randle-Conde’s Quantum Diaries blog post.

    SMU has a team of researchers led by SMU Physics Professor Ryszard Stroynowski working on the CERN experiment. The team includes three other Physics Department faculty: Jingbo Ye, Robert Kehoe and Stephen Sekula, six postdoctoral fellows, including Randle-Conde, and five graduate students.

    Quantum Diaries, as the site explains, “is a Web site that follows physicists from around the world as they experience life at the energy, intensity and cosmic frontiers of particle physics. Through their bios, videos, photos and blogs, the diarists offer a personal look at the daily lives of particle physicists.”

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    Fermilab: Tevatron experiments report latest results in search for Higgs boson

    Using different search techniques, Tevatron physicists see hints of Higgs boson sighting consistent with those from LHC

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    To book a live or taped interview with Robert Kehoe in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

    Book a live interview

    To book a live or taped interview with Fredrick Olness in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

    The Quest for the Higgs Boson

    “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” — physicist Richard Feynman

    By Fredrick Olness
    Chairman and Professor
    SMU Department of Physics
    A 50 year search for the origin of particle mass nears an end. Maybe.

    Mass is a seemingly simple property of everyday objects — atoms, humans, coffee cups. Yet, to understand the origin of mass on a fundamental level has been a challenging problem with a long history. The solution to this problem, suggested nearly 50 years ago, was the Higgs Boson (or just Higgs, for short). However, it has yet to be discovered.

    On Wednesday, March 7, 2012, an end to the Higgs search appeared much closer when the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois presented the latest results from two of its experiments, CDF and DZero, in an early morning announcement viewed around the globe on the World Wide Web.

    The announcement was a joint presentation by researchers from CDF and DZero, the two large independent experiments at Fermilab, in which they presented evidence for the Higgs based on the results of their data.

    Both the CDF and DZero experiments observed evidence for the Higgs. While the evidence was significant, it was not yet sufficient to claim an unambiguous discovery; however, it is quite compelling that the Higgs mass range obtained by these two independent experiments is consistent.

    These results represent a tremendous step forward in explaining why fundamental particles have mass, and whether the Higgs exists.

    The Fermilab results are similar in statistical significance to those presented in December 2011 by the Large Hadron Collider and Atlas experiments at the CERN particle collider in Europe, which announced that its data indicated hints of the Higgs boson.

    What is the Higgs boson?
    The postulated Higgs boson is responsible for giving mass to the many fundamental particles that make up the universe. This includes the quarks that comprise protons and neutrons, which comprise atoms and molecules, which comprise humans and everything around them. In essence, the Higgs generates the mass of the fundamental particles that make up you and your coffee cup.

    We know objects have mass — just lift a heavy suitcase or weigh yourself on a scale. But to explain this seemingly simple idea in the context of our current fundamental theories has been a struggle ever since the idea of the Higgs was introduced 50 year ago. The problem is that to give particles mass in a straightforward manner would spoil a particular symmetry of the theory known as the “gauge symmetry.” Who cares? you ask, and why should I be worried about symmetry?

    Symmetries have been an important guiding aspect of physics dating back before Einstein, who used symmetry principles, in part, to conclude that “all reference frames are created equal,” which led to his Theory of Relativity — certainly one of the triumphs of the 20th Century.

    And that is what is so special about the Higgs; it gives particles a mass without violating the rules of symmetry.

    How does the Higgs solve the problem?
    According to our current understanding, Higgs bosons permeate all of space. As fundamental particles move through space, Higgs bosons interact with the particles and effectively exert a drag on them; it is this drag effect which we interpret as the mass of the particle.

    Consider the following experiment. First move your coffee cup through the air, and then repeat this motion underwater; the water provides more resistance on the cup and it “feels more massive” as you drag it through the water as compared to the air. It is the interaction between the water and the coffee cup that provides the resistance to motion of mass. In this analogy, the water is playing the role of the Higgs.

    It is the same with a quark, one of the fundamental particles that matter is made from. As a quark moves through space it interacts with the Higgs, and this interaction exerts a drag on the quark so that it “feels heavy.” But this is an illusion; in the strict interpretation of the theory, the quark has “mass” only because of the interaction with the Higgs that simulates the effects of the weight.

    DÉJÀ VU: Luminiferous aether
    To recap, the current theoretical picture is that Higgs bosons are everywhere. They permeate all space, and they must exist so that fundamental particles (that make up you and your coffee cup) have mass.

    Have we seen this situation before?

    In the late 1800’s, physicists posited the existence of a “luminiferous aether” which permeated all space. Scientists knew that water waves traveled through water, sound waves through air, and so they believed that light waves also needed something to travel through; luminiferous aether was invented to serve this purpose and get the “right” answer. There were many experiments that gave indirect evidence for the aether; however, all attempts to directly measure it were unsuccessful. Eventually it was demonstrated that the luminiferous aether did not exist, and this paved the way for Einstein to show that it was unnecessary and to present an alternative, his theory of relativity.

    Thus, the non-existence of luminiferous aether actually led to more fantastic discoveries than if it had been proven.

    Direct vs. indirect evidence
    So we come to the central question: does the Higgs exist?

    There is ample indirect evidence that the Higgs exists. We know that fundamental particles have mass, and we believe this mass is due to particle interactions with Higgs bosons. Over the past 50 years physicists have performed a variety of sophisticated experiments, and they all point to the existence of the Higgs.

    However, in many ways the Higgs is a contrived solution; inelegant, introduced into the theory because so far there has been no better way to get the right answer — that particles have mass.

    Just because it is currently the only solution developed does not mean it is the one that nature chooses.

    And that is why we need direct evidence of the Higgs; we need to produce an actual Higgs in the laboratory, study its properties, and verify our theoretical view of the world with cold, hard facts from experimental observation.

    The 2011 and 2012 results
    The LHC and Fermilab experiments are producing these facts and evidence.

    If the Higgs is confirmed to exist, it would validate our theory of how particles acquire mass, and serve as the foundation for myriad experiments in the future. Many speculate this discovery would also warrant a Nobel Prize.

    If the Higgs is confirmed to not exist, it would likely send many theorists back to the drawing board in hopes of finding that nature has an even more clever mechanism of how particles acquire mass than we have yet been capable of conceiving. And, just as the non-existence of the aether set the stage for relativity, the non-existence of the Higgs could set the stage for future surprises.

    Either way it will be an exciting journey and the results from the LHC and Fermilab bring us one step closer to the answer.

    Fredrick Olness is a theoretical physicist at SMU studying Quantum Chromodynamics (the fundamental force that binds nuclei) to help answer the questions: What are the fundamental building blocks of nature, and what holds them together?

    New measurements announced March 7 by scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory indicate that the elusive Higgs boson may nearly be cornered.

    After analyzing the full data set from the Tevatron accelerator, which completed its last run in September 2011, the two independent experiments see hints of a Higgs boson.

    The new results from Fermilab signify that it’s increasingly difficult to ignore the existence of the Higgs boson, said physicist Robert Kehoe, a professor at Southern Methodist University, who is a scientist on one of the Fermilab experiments that announced the results.

    “The Higgs is a fundamental particle theorized about 40 years ago to give matter to the mass that we observe, and which scientists have tried to observe for decades,” Kehoe said. “This is a hint that it exists. It doesn’t establish a discovery. But it lends a little more credence to the theory that there is something there. Anyone trying to say there isn’t a Higgs particle — the data are having a harder time backing that up.”

    SMU students who are also participating in the DZero experiment at Fermilab include physics graduate students HuanZhao Liu and Yuriy Ilchenko; SMU postdoctoral researchers Peter Renkel and Amitabha Das; and undergraduate physics student Jason South.

    If scientists from CERN and Fermi can confirm in the near future a discovery of the Higgs, that will validate the Standard Model of fundamental particles and interactions, which summarizes current knowledge in particle physics.

    “At this point we’ve seen a hint that we may someday observe the long lost Standard Model family member,” said SMU’s Liu.

    “No doubt, we live in a very exciting and thrilling historical moment,” said Ilchenko. “The new Higgs results and a promising discovery will not only solve the centuries-old mystery of origin of mass but also highlight a victory of science and the triumph of humanity as a whole.”

    Click to read: Frequently asked questions about the Higgs boson.

    Data could indicate a Higgs boson with mass similar to CERN data

    DZero ring at Fermi

    The Fermilab results are similar in statistical significance to those presented by the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN particle collider in Europe, which in December announced hints of the Higgs boson.

    At Fermilab, physicists from the CDF and DZero collaborations found excesses in their data that might be interpreted as coming from a Higgs boson with a mass in the region of 115 to 135 GeV. In this range, the new result has a probability of being due to a statistical fluctuation at level of significance known among scientists as 2.2 sigma. This new result also excludes the possibility of the Higgs having a mass in the range from 147 to 179 GeV.

    Physicists claim evidence of a new particle only if the probability that the data could be due to a statistical fluctuation is less than 1 in 740, or three sigmas. A discovery is claimed only if that probability is less than 1 in 3.5 million, or five sigmas.

    This result sits well within the stringent constraints established by earlier direct and indirect measurements made by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the Tevatron, and other accelerators, which place the mass of the Higgs boson within the range of 115 to 127 GeV. These findings are also consistent with the December 2011 announcement of excesses seen in that range by LHC experiments, which searched for the Higgs in different decay patterns.

    Jury still out on confirmation of Higgs
    None of the hints announced so far from the Tevatron or LHC experiments, however, are strong enough to claim evidence for the Higgs boson.

    “The end game is approaching in the hunt for the Higgs boson,” said Jim Siegrist, DOE Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics. “This is an important milestone for the Tevatron experiments, and demonstrates the continuing importance of independent measurements in the quest to understand the building blocks of nature.”

    Physicists from the CDF and DZero experiments made the announcement at the annual conference on Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories known as Rencontres de Moriond in Italy. This is the latest result in a decade-long search by teams of physicists at the Tevatron.

    “I am thrilled with the pace of progress in the hunt for the Higgs boson. CDF and DZero scientists from around the world have pulled out all the stops to reach this very nice and important contribution to the Higgs boson search,” said Fermilab Director Pier Oddone. “The two collaborations independently combed through hundreds of trillions of proton-antiproton collisions recorded by their experiments to arrive at this exciting result.”

    Higgs bosons, if they exist, are short-lived and can decay in many different ways. Just as a vending machine might return the same amount of change using different combinations of coins, the Higgs can decay into different combinations of particles. Discovering the Higgs boson relies on observing a statistically significant excess of the particles into which the Higgs decays and those particles must have corresponding kinematic properties that allow for the mass of the Higgs to be reconstructed.

    “There is still much work ahead before the scientific community can say for sure whether the Higgs boson exists,” said Dmitri Denisov, DZero co-spokesperson and physicist at Fermilab. “Based on these exciting hints, we are working as quickly as possible to further improve our analysis methods and squeeze the last ounce out of Tevatron data.”

    High-energy particle colliders recreate the Big Bang’s energy
    Only high-energy particle colliders such as the Tevatron and LHC can recreate the energy conditions found in the universe shortly after the Big Bang. According to the Standard Model, the theory that explains and predicts how nature’s building blocks behave and interact with each other, the Higgs boson gives mass to other particles.

    “Without something like the Higgs boson giving fundamental particles mass, the whole world around us would be very different from what we see today,” said Giovanni Punzi, CDF co-spokesperson and physicist at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, or INFN, in Pisa, Italy. “Physicists have known for a long time that the Higgs or something like it must exist, and we are eager to finally pin this phenomenon down and start learning more about it.”

    If a Higgs boson is created in a high-energy particle collision, it immediately decays into lighter more stable particles before even the world’s best detectors and fastest computers can snap a picture of it. To find the Higgs boson, physicists retraced the path of these secondary particles and ruled out processes that mimic its signal.

    The experiments at the Tevatron and the LHC offer a complementary search strategy for the Higgs boson. The Tevatron was a proton/anti-proton collider, with a maximum center of mass energy of 2 TeV, whereas the LHC is a proton/proton collider that will ultimately reach 14 TeV.

    Search strategies vary at the two accelerators
    Because the two accelerators collide different pairs of particles at different energies and produce different types of backgrounds, the search strategies are different. At the Tevatron, for example, the most powerful method is to search the CDF and DZero datasets to look for a Higgs boson that decays into a pair of bottom quarks if the Higgs boson mass is approximately 115-130 GeV.

    It is crucial to observe the Higgs boson in several types of decay modes because the Standard Model predicts different branching ratios for different decay modes. If these ratios are observed, then this is experimental confirmation of both the Standard Model and the Higgs.

    “The search for the Higgs boson by the Tevatron and LHC experiments is like two people taking a picture of a park from different vantage points,” said Gregorio Bernardi, DZero co-spokesperson at the Nuclear Physics Laboratory of the High Energies, or LPNHE, in Paris.

    “One picture may show a child that is blocked from the other’s view by a tree. Both pictures may show the child but only one can resolve the child’s features,” said Bernardi. “You need to combine both viewpoints to get a true picture of who is in the park. At this point both pictures are fuzzy and we think maybe they show someone in the park. Eventually the LHC with future data samples will be able to give us a sharp picture of what is there. The Tevatron by further improving its analyses will also sharpen the picture which is emerging today.”

    Result represents years of work by hundreds of scientists
    This new updated analysis uses 10 inverse femtobarns of data from both CDF and DZero, the full data set collected from 10 years of the Tevatron’s collider program. Ten inverse femtobarns of data represents about 500 trillion proton-antiproton collisions. Data analysis will continue at both experiments.

    “This result represents years of work from hundreds of scientists around the world,” said Rob Roser, CDF co-spokesperson and physicist at Fermilab. “But we are not done yet – together with our LHC colleagues, we expect 2012 to be the year we know whether the Higgs exists or not, and assuming it is discovered, we will have first indications that it behaves as predicted by the Standard Model.”

    CDF is an international experiment of 430 physicists from 58 institutions in 15 countries . DZero is an international experiment conducted by 446 physicists from 82 institutions in 18 countries . Funding for the CDF and DZero experiments comes from DOE’s Office of Science, the National Science Foundation, and a number of international funding agencies. — Fermilab and Southern Methodist University

    Frequently Asked Questions About the Higgs Boson
    Why should the average person care if the Higgs is found?
    Understanding more about the building blocks of matter and the forces that control their interactions helps scientists to learn how to manipulate those forces to humankind’s benefit.

    For example, the study of the electron led to the development of electricity, the study of quantum mechanics made possible the creation of GPS systems and the study of the weak force led to an understanding of radioactive decay and nuclear power.

    Now what?
    The Tevatron experiments will continue to further analyze the Higgs boson data to wring out more information. In addition, the Tevatron and LHC experiments are working to combine their data for a release at an unspecified date.

    Even if both teams find evidence of a Higgs boson in the same location, physicists will need to do more analysis to make sure the Higgs boson isn’t a non-Standard Model Higgs masquerading as a resident of the Standard Model. That will require physicists to measure several properties in addition to mass.

    What would finding the Higgs boson mean for the field of physics?
    Finding evidence of the Higgs boson would expand the following three areas of study:

    • Pin-pointing the mass range of the Higgs would help physicists condense the number of theories about the existence of undiscovered particles and the forces that interact on them. For example, a Standard Model Higgs boson would rule out classic QCD-like versions of technicolor theory.

      A Higgs boson with a mass larger than 125 GeV would rule out the simplest versions of supersymmetry, or SUSY, which predict that every known particle has an unknown sibling particles with a different mass. Other theories would gain more support. One such SUSY theory predicts that a Standard Model Higgs boson would appear as the lightest of a group of five or more Higgs bosons. Whether the Higgs boson exists or not does not affect theories about the existence of extra dimensions.

    • Knowing the mass of the Higgs boson would give physicists more data to plug into other equations about how our universe formed and about some of the least understood particle interactions, such as magnetic muon anomaly.
    • Finding evidence of a heavy mass Higgs boson (larger than 150 GeV) would require the existence of undiscovered particles and/or forces. Finding a light mass Higgs boson (less than 125 GeV) would not require the existence of new physics but doesn’t rule it out either.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility on campus for live TV, radio or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or to book them in the SMU studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650 or UT Dallas Office of Media Relations at 972-883-4321.

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    Fermilab Today: Top quark mass team wages war on two fronts

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    The research of SMU physicist Robert Kehoe, a professor in the SMU Department of Physics, has been featured by Fermilab Today. The magazine is the official publication of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago. Fermi is a high-energy particle physics laboratory credited in 1995 with discovery of the fundamental particle, the top quark.

    The article, “Top quark mass team wages war on two fronts,” appears in Fermilab Today‘s Jan. 26 edition as the “Result of the Week.”

    Kehoe is part of the DZero collaboration of scientists who seek measurements of the top quark to determine the mass of the Higgs boson, another fundamental particle that has never been observed but which theoretical physicists have theorized generates mass for all particles that comprise matter. Others from SMU who were instrumental in the analysis include doctoral student Yuriy Ilchenko and post doctoral researcher Peter Renkel.

    The paper “Measurement of the top quark mass in collisions using events with two leptons” was published by Fermilab. It reports DZero has obtained the world’s most precise measurement in the dilepton channel of the top quark mass.

    “The measurement precision is now down to 1.6% in these events, which is astounding given how rare dilepton events are,” Kehoe said. “Perhaps more importantly, we have pursued a new way of calibrating these events that dramatically lowered the systematic uncertainty, and will allow it to decrease with more data — we have half the data yet to analyze.”

    Read the full story.

    EXCERPT:
    By Mike Cooke
    Fermilab Today

    Two major factors contribute to the ultimate precision of a measurement of the top quark mass: the amount of data used to make that measurement and the understanding of the uncertainty introduced by the detector. The amount of data used affects the size of the statistical uncertainty of the measurement, while accounting for the bias of the detector effects leads to the systematic uncertainty. Since the final precision of a measurement can’t be smaller than the larger of these two uncertainties, it is possible to have a measurement that is limited by the systematics. A systematically limited measurement won’t improve by simply taking more data. The most recent top quark mass measurement at DZero succeeded in turning a systematically limited analysis channel into a statistically limited one.

    The top quark always decays into a W boson and a bottom quark. The W boson can decay into a neutrino and a charged lepton, such as an electron or muon, or into quarks. The major distinction between top quark pair analysis channels is the number of leptonic W boson decays allowed. In the dilepton channel, both W bosons decay leptonically and two neutrinos are produced. However, the incomplete reconstruction of neutrinos in the DZero detector leads to ambiguity when studying these top quark pair events. To account for this ambiguity, DZero physicists considered all possible values of the neutrino parameters to determine the value of the top quark mass that best fits the DZero data set.

    Read the full story.

    SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

    SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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    The Shorthorn: SMU’s Jodi Cooley sheds light on dark matter

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    To book a live or taped interview with Jodi Cooley in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

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    Science students at the University of Texas at Arlington gathered Wednesday for a talk by SMU physicist Jodi Cooley about her work as part of a scientific team searching for dark matter. Cooley, an assistant professor in the SMU Department of Physics, is an experimental particle physicist and is part of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search. Her talk at the university was covered by The Shorthorn, the university’s newspaper.

    Read the full story.

    EXCERPT:

    By Russell Kirby
    The Shorthorn Staff
    Jodi Cooley, physics assistant professor from Southern Methodist University, spoke about the way her team of researchers is attempting to detect dark matter to an audience of about 30 students and faculty.

    Physics assistant professor Chris Jackson, who invited Cooley to speak, said her eight years of involvement with the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search and time as a spokeswoman for the search experiments makes her an expert on the subject.

    “I like to solve interesting problems,” Cooley said. “To me, one of the most interesting puzzles is that 85 percent of matter in the universe is missing. We’re trying to figure it out, but it’s a hard problem.”

    Cooley presented analysis from data released last spring and explained the variety of potential improvements that would contribute to the development of this data and ultimately the detection of dark matter. The overall hype of the subject inspired questions from professors.

    Among them was a question from physics professor Zdzislaw Musielak, who asked how the accuracy of Cooley’s graphs improved over time. Cooley said the testing equipment became more accurate and thus the results were more accurate.

    Read the full story.

    SMU has an uplink facility on campus for live TV, radio or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or to book them in the SMU studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650 or UT Dallas Office of Media Relations at 972-883-4321.

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    Dallas Observer: As Physicists Near Discovery of God Particle, A Word With SMU Prof Involved In the Search

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