Winter 2022

03/12/2022 | The James Webb Space Telescope: Discovery in Space -- Michael Meyer (U-M Astronomy)

On December 25, 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched on an Ariane 5 rocket at the Guiana Space Centre in South America, beginning its 30-day journey to its final destination in orbit about a semi-stable position relative to the Sun and Earth.

This exciting beginning also marked the end of 20+ years of design, development, and construction for this flagship facility that will have a profound impact on many branches of astronomy and astrophysics. Professor Meyer will review the capabilities of this magnificent new space telescope as well as preview some of the discoveries it is poised to make

04/09/2022 | A Quantum Hologram for Black Holes -- Leopoldo Pando Zayas (U-M Physics)

Black holes are massive objects so dense that the gravitational force holds light within a distance called the event horizon. This strong gravitational force also causes black holes to grow as energy is converted into the black holes' mass. Steven Hawking explored this flow of energy bringing the science of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy to black holes. A black-hole's entropy, a thermodynamic measure of the information hidden within the event horizon, is proportional to its surface area. This remarkable finding points to analogies between these spacetime singularities and systems of particles, such as gasses. In this talk, Professor Pando Zayas will describe how Quantum Mechanics alters this picture, making corrections to the black-hole entropy that affects black-hole physics.

04/23/2022 | The Van Loo Family Graduate Student Presentations -- Mackenzie Devilbiss (U-M Physics) and Chamindu Sangeeth Amarasinghe (U-M Physics)

The Underground Quest for Dark Matter
Chamindu Sangeeth Amarasinghe
In the prevalent framework of cosmology, dark matter accounts for 85% of the matter in the universe. Despite this abundance, little is known about the nature of dark matter due to its extremely weak interactions with ordinary matter. In this talk, Chamindu shall describe how the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment seeks to detect dark matter particles of a certain type as they pass through Earth using a detector located 4850 feet underground.

Shapeshifting Mystery: the Muon-to-Electron Conversion Experiment
Mackenzie Devilbiss
The Mu2e Experiment at Fermilab will search for the conversion of a muon to an electron, a process so rare that it is deemed to be forbidden in the Standard Model of particle physics! This experiment is truly akin to picking a needle out of a haystack: to look for a very rare muon process, we need to identify all of the other ways that muons can decay and rule them out. With detectors designed to find this 'needle', Mu2e will better inform what we know about the universe on the smallest scale.