The Arts & Sciences' Department of Physics and Astronomy invites local Hispanic and Latinx elementary school students from Cardinal Valley, Liberty and Maxwell elementary schools, to come explore outer space and learn about the amazing work that astronomers do! The celebration will include a fun-filled evening featuring activities, crafts, awesome speakers, and a chance to gaze into the beautiful night sky through our state-of-the-art space telescope housed inside UK's MacAdam Observatory. And to top it off, there will be free tacos, snacks and drinks! 

The observations of high redshift quasars up to z~7 tell us that massive black holes (MBHs) were already in place, with masses well above 10^9 solar masses, when the Universe was less than 1 Gyr old. According to Soltan’s argument MBHs gain most of their mass via radiatively efficient accretion, hence we expect they formed early in the Universe as smaller seeds. To date, the common formation mechanism advocated to explain the most massive MBHs at high redshift is the direct collapse scenario, which leads to the formation of seed MBHs of about 10^4-5 Msun. However, because of the peculiar conditions required by this formation mechanism, its plausibility is still debated. After highlighting the main conditions required by this scenario, I will discuss whether the peculiar environment in which high-redshift massive galaxies evolve provides ideal conditions for the formation of such massive seeds, and the processes that may potentially inhibit the process. I will also discuss the subsequent evolution of these protogalaxies and their central MBHs up to the observed masses, a result that strongly depends on the interaction with its galaxy host, and how the MBH obesity found by observations is not necessarily real.

Semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering (SIDIS) is an essential tool to probe the quark-gluon structure of the proton and thus for our understanding of non-perturbative QCD dynamics. The CLAS12 experiment has been taking physics data at the upgraded Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Jefferson Laboratory since 2018. It takes advantage of the world record luminosities provided by CEBAF to perform an ambitious program of 3D imaging of the proton in momentum and position space. This talk will present the first results from the SIDIS program. I will focus on the first observation of beam-spin asymmetries in di-pion production in SIDIS. From the measured di-pion correlations a first extraction of the collinear twist-3 PDF e(x), which is sensitive to quark-gluon correlations in the proton, can be performed. Furthermore spin-orbit correlations in the hadronization of longitudinal polarized quarks into pions can be studied for the first time.

Laser spectroscopy of simple atoms is sensitive to properties of the atomic
nucleus, such as its charge and magnetization distribution, or its
polarizability. This allows determining the nuclear parameters from atomic
spectroscopy, but also limits the attainable precision for the determination of
fundamental constants or the test of QED and the Standard Model.

In light muonic atoms and ions, one negative muon replaces all atomic electrons,
resulting in a calculable hydrogen-like system. Due to the muon's large mass
(200 times the electron mass), the muon orbits the nucleus on a 200 times
smaller Bohr radius, increasing the sensitivity of muonic atoms to nuclear
properties by 200^3 = 10 million.

This has resulted in a 10fold increase in the precision of the charge radius of
the proton, deuteron, and the stable helium nuclei. The consequences for atomic
and nuclear physics, the determination of fundamental constants, and the test of
QED and the Standard Model are discussed.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/69sdbudfg8245pj/AACTb2WyBF_R2ujBHJkIx6zja?dl=0

Many models of neutrino-nucleus scattering are guided by data taken during the 1970's and 1980's by the Argonne, Brookhaven, and Fermilab bubble-chamber experiments, which have limited data sample sizes and large systematic uncertainties.  The long-baseline neutrino facility (LBNF) will provide a neutrino beam, primarily composed of $\nu_\mu$ when it runs with forward horn current, and $\bar\nu_\mu$ when it runs with reverse horn current.  The beam intensity is driven by the power of the proton beam on the target, which is slated to start at 1.2 MW and will be upgraded to 2.4 MW.  The near detectors currently being designed are optimized for DUNE's determination of the neutrino mass ordering and the measurement of $\delta_{\rm{CP}}$.  This powerful beam provides unprecedented opportunities to measure the cross sections of neutrinos on protons and neutrons via hydrogen/deuterium targets with integrated particle detection capability.  Options range from using the hydrogen in the scintillating plastic in the SAND near detector component, to adding hydrogen-rich gas to the high-pressure gas TPC near detector component, to building a H$_2$/D$_2$ bubble chamber in a separate hall upstream of the DUNE near detector hall. Polarized targets are also under consideration, though these will necessarily involve other elements along with the hydrogen and deuterium, but they will allow the first measurements of neutrino scattering on polarized nuclei.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/z67mq9zfdwm6wj8/AAC2v83jGvFJOujFrVi2Nmr2a?dl=0

Lattice QCD (LQCD) is a theoretical non-perturbative approach for studying QCD dynamics numerically from first principles. LQCD is widely used for hadron structure calculations and is becoming a reliable tool, striving to control various sources of systematic uncertainties. Parton distribution functions (PDFs) have a central role in understanding the hadron structure and have been calculated in lattice QCD mainly via their Mellin moments.

In this talk, I will present selected results using an alternative new method to access PDFs proposed by X. Ji in 2013. This is the so-called quasi-distribution method, which relies on matrix elements of fast-moving hadrons and non-local operators. These are matched to the light-cone PDFs using Large Momentum Effective Theory (LaMET). The main focus of the talk is to demonstrate a novel calculation of twist-3 gT PDF, explored in lattice QCD for the first time. I will also show results from the first calculation of the chiral-even unpolarized and helicity quark generalized parton distributions (GPDs), extracted from numerical simulations of lattice QCD. The calculation is performed on one ensemble of two degenerate light, a strange and a charm quark (Nf=2+1+1) of maximally twisted mass fermions with a clover term, reproducing a pion mass of 260 MeV.

We report results of a new technique to measure the electric dipole moment of ¹²⁹Xe with ³He comagnetometry. Both species are polarized using spin-exchange optical pumping, transferred to a measurement cell, and transported into a magnetically shielded room, where SQUID magnetometers detect free precession in applied electric and magnetic fields. The result from a one-week measurement campaign in 2017 and a 2.5 week campaign in 2018, combined with detailed study of systematic effects, is d_A(¹²⁹Xe)=(1.4±6.6_stat±2.0_syst)×10⁻²⁸ ecm. This corresponds to an upper limit of |d_A(¹²⁹Xe)|<1.4×10⁻²⁷ecm (95% CL), a factor of five more sensitive than the limit set in 2001.

I review the theory side of the synergetic international effort of experimentalists and theorists in Compton scattering on one- and few-nucleon systems. It is an excellent opportunity to probe the symmetries and strengths of nucleonic and nuclear interactions and relate to lattice-QCD computations of fundamental hadronic properties. Rich information is encoded in the polarisabilities, which parametrise the stiffness of charge distributions against deformations. The spin polarisabilities are particularly interesting since they parametrise the stiffness of the spin in external electro-magnetic fields (nucleonic Faraday effect) and probe the spin-dependent component of the pion-nucleon interaction. I then discuss tests and extractions of the polarisabilities of the proton and neutron from data. Comprehensive studies show how sensitive observables for nuclei up to ${}^4$He are on the individual nucleonic scalar and spin polarisabilities, and to their combinations. We are also developing statistical methods to identify experiments with the likely biggest impact on extracting values from future data. This facilitates planning and analysis of the new generation of Compton experiments.