Seminars - Fall 2011

UO Center for High Energy Physics

October 10, 2011 (Monday) Hosted by Eric Torrence, University of Oregon

November 4, 2011 (Friday) Zack Sullivan, Illinois Institute of Technology

Past Seminars

October 10, 2011 - Monday

Hosted by Eric Torrence, University of Oregon

Measurement of the Neutrino Velocity with the OPERA Detector

The OPERA collaboration has recently announced results which could be interpreted as a measurement of neutrino velocities greater than the speed of light. In this seminar, we will watch a recording of a seminar given at CERN on 23 September by Dario Autiero on behalf of the OPERA collaboration describing the results and the various technical effects which could contribute to the observed anomaly.

4:00pm, 412 Willamette Hall

Refreshments served at 3:45

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November 4, 2011 - Friday

Zack Sullivan, Illinois Institute of Technology

Rise and Decline of an Anomaly

Early this year there was great excitement that a new particle may have been discovered by the CDF experiment at Fermilab. This purported particle decayed into two jets, producing a nice mass peak in the Wjj spectrum. Despite an initial CDF claim that the probability of this being an artifact of backgrounds was less than 1 part in 100,000, I will show how we went about demonstrating there is in fact no excess in the CDF Wjj data. Instead, there are some interesting issues with the measurements of single-top-quark production in CDF and D0 data that both explain the Wjj discrepancy, and lead to broader questions about the experimental data sets.

4:00pm, 472 Willamette Hall

Refreshments served at 3:45

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