Geneva University

École de physique - Département de physique nucléaire et corspusculaire

24, quai Ernest-Ansermet
1211 GENÈVE 4
Tél: (022) 379 62 73 - Fax: (022) 379 69 92

Monday 9 March 2009

COLLOQUIUM

at 17:00 – Stückelberg Auditorium

Are We Descended From Heavy Neutrinos?

Prof. Boris Kayser / Fermilab (Fermi National Accelerator Center, Geneva, Illinois, USA)

Neutrinos are among the most abundant particles in the universe. The discovery that they have nonzero masses has raised a number of very interesting questions about them, and about their connections to other areas of physics and to cosmology. After briefly reviewing what has been learned about the neutrinos so far, we will identify the major open questions, explain why they are interesting, and discuss ideas and plans for answering them through future experiments. We will highlight a particularly intriguing question: Are neutrinos the key to understanding why the universe contains matter but almost no antimatter, making it safe for life?

Organizer : Prof. Markus Büttiker

Wednesday 11 March 2009

PARTICLE PHYSICS SEMINAR

at 17:00 – Stückelberg Auditorium

What can we learn from top quark physics at CDF?

Dr. Alison Lister

After a brief introduction to (or reminder of) the Tevatron accelerator and the CDF experiment, we will delve into the depths of how a top physics analyses is done at CDF. We will follow through how each of the pieces used to measure the top quark cross section are obtained or measured and finally how all the pieces are put together to get a measurement as precise as the current best theoretical predictions.

We can then use that analysis infrastructure to search for new physics that appears in the top event sample, in this particular case by describing a search for fourth generation top-like quarks, one of the few CDF analyses to see something "fishy" we don’t fully understand.

This seminar will aim to illustrate more the process of carrying out a measurement at a hadron collider than of showing the whole array of top physics results from CDF. As a result of this, the talk will be targeted implicitly at younger scientists who have maybe not yet been able to see data, or anyone from outside accelerator-based experiments who is curious to know how we actually get to our results we show at conferences.

Information :

http://dpnc.unige.ch/seminaire/annonce.html

Organizer : J.-S. Graulich