After a long hiatus- Abrams Planetarium's Astronomical Horizons Lecture Series returns on Oct. 27, 2022!!
Oct. 27 at 6:00pm Ghost Particle North American Premiere
Ghost Particle (2021) is a science documentary that follows international efforts to understand the universe by studying its smallest parts with some of the world’s largest experiments. Neutrinos are invisible, essentially massless particles that pass through matter like ghosts. They act in peculiar quantum ways and their identity-changing behaviour may hold the key to unlocking big questions about the origin of matter in the universe. This film will be followed by a Q&A with international scientists including our won Professor Kendall Mahn.
This will be our first Astronomical Horizons Lecture series event since the start of the pandemic. Note we are doing it on a different day and time than usual to accommodate our international scientists joining us!
Speaker and Panelist Bios: Kendall Mahn is currently an Associate Professor at MSU in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Her 2009 Ph.D. dissertation Columbia University with Mike Shaevitz was on a search for muon neutrino and antineutrino disappearance due to sterile mixing with the MiniBooNE experiment. As a postdoctoral research fellow at TRIUMF, she served in multiple leadership roles on the Tokai-to-Kamioka neutrino oscillation experiment, including oscillation analysis convener. Mahn has held leadership roles on T2K (analysis co-coordinator from 2017-2021) and on the future Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (Calibration Consortium technical lead); she is a Snowmass topical convener for neutrino cross sections. Her research interests are focused on precision measurements of neutrino mixing parameters. She was a 2016 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and a 2016 Fundamental Physics Breakthrough Prize Laureate.
Jake Calcutt is a Postdoctoral Fellow studying High Energy Physics at Oregon State University. He received his B.S. in Physics at Michigan State University in 2015. He then received his Ph.D. from MSU in 2021 under the tutelage of Kendall Mahn in a measurement of Pion-argon absorption and charge exchange interactions with the ProtoDUNE-SP detector. Much of his current work focuses on developing the computing infrastructure and software for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) and its subprojects. His research interests focus on measuring interactions of hadrons with argon in an effort to inform nuclear modelling within neutrino simulations such as those which will be used in DUNE.
Bryan Ramson is a neutrino physicist working on the intensity frontier of high-energy particle physics. He works as an associate scientist at Fermilab, where he uses his expertise in medium and high-energy nuclear physics to improve measurements of neutrino oscillations and refine our understanding of neutrino-nucleus interactions. He is a member of two large experimental collaborations: the Fermilab NuMI Off-axis νe Appearance (NOvA) Experiment and the upcoming Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), a future Fermilab experiment. When not directly supporting the measurement of neutrino oscillations, he studies neutrino-nucleus interactions in the NOvA Near Detector and leads an independent R&D project to develop a new generation of hydrogen bubble chambers.
Francesca Stocker completed her PhD in Physics in 2021 at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. She spent four years working in neutrino physics contributing to the construction, commissioning, data taking and analysis of ProtoDUNE Single Phase. Francesca enjoyed working in research and contributing to the scientific findings in neutrino related topics such as hadronic cross-sections in liquid argon with her thesis measurement. After concluding her academic career she is looking for new challenges in a different field while still staying close to the scientific community. She starts now a position as a scientific counselor for the swiss government. She will be counseling authorities and developing the strategy for the swiss funding contributions of CERN related projects, specifically the Future Circular Collider FCC.
