Next ORION meeting Oct. 17
The next ORION program will take place at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 17, at The City Room of the McNally-Coffey Building, Roane State Community College, Oak Ridge Campus. The program is open to the public.
The title of the program is “Mirror Mirror: Neutron Oscillations" and the speaker will be Frank Gonzalez. He is a postdoctoral research associate in the Neutron Symmetries group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He received his bachelor's degree in physics from Cornell University, where he did research in accelerator physics. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from Indiana University, Bloomington, where his dissertation topic was a precise measurement of the free neutron lifetime, according to a news release.
A description of the talk follows: "One force in the Standard Model of particle physics, the weak nuclear interaction, can be probed precisely by using neutrons. The weak nuclear interaction only acts on left-handed particles. The theory of “mirror matter” hypothesizes a hidden copy of the Standard Model and all its particles, but with a right-handed weak interaction to restore parity. This mirror sector would be a potential dark matter candidate. Transformations from neutrons into either their mirror counterparts or antineutrons could help explain the abundance of matter over antimatter in the universe. Measurements of the neutron lifetime disagree between either counting surviving neutrons or counting their decay products. If neutrons can transition into mirror neutrons, this could explain the lifetime discrepancy. An experiment at Oak Ridge National Lab probed this theory by searching for the reappearance of neutrons passing through an absorber inside a varying magnetic field. This talk presents the results of this experiment, excluding mirror matter as an explanation for the neutron lifetime discrepancy. We will also discuss neutron decay probes of the weak interaction and further searches for neutrons oscillating into both dark matter and antimatter."
ORION is an amateur science and astronomy club centered in Oak Ridge. It supports the Tamke-Allan Observatory.
This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Next ORION meeting Oct. 17
