Notice Board

Everyone is welcome to attend The Prairie University Physics Seminar Series presented by the Physics & Astronomy Department Spring 2018 Speaker Series:

What's So Cool About Ultracold Neutrons?

Ultracold neutrons are neutrons that have been cooled below 3 mK.  At this temperature, they travel at a speed less than ~29 km/hr and exhibit the peculiar behavior of being able to be stored in magnetic, material, and gravitational bottles for periods ranging up to their beta-decay lifetime (~15 min).   They present a new avenue for performing fundamental neutron experiments such as: searching for a non-zero neutron electric dipole moment (nEDM), precise measurement of the neutron lifetime, and precision measurements of neutron beta decay correlation coefficients to name a few.  These measurements have important consequences for extensions to the standard model of particle physics which could help explain the baryon asymmetry of our universe.

Work has been ongoing for almost a decade to install a UCN source in Canada at TRIUMF, Canada's Particle Accelerator Center, to perform a world competitive nEDM measurement.  In the fall of 2017, the TUCAN collaboration (TRIUMF UltraCold Advanced Neutron Source)  produced the first UCN in Canada with a prototype spallation based UCN source.  Here spallation neutrons are cooled by deuterium ice and superfluid helium cryogenic convertors.  This source will be used to perform UCN focused R&D in preparation for the installation of a higher throughput superfluid helium based UCN source and nEDM experiment.  I will present recent results from the protoype UCN source at TRIUMF and some of the nEDM subsystem work being done at the University of Winnipeg.

Date: Thursday March 15, 2018

Time: 1:40 to 2:55 p.m.

Location: C640

Dr. Russell Mammei

Department of Physics

University of Winnipeg

Please see attached posters for more details & for infomation about upcoming talks

ALL ARE WELCOME TO ATTEND