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Dr. Florian Kuchler

TRIUMF
Email: fkuchler@triumf.ca

Date of Live Presentation: tba
Location: tba



Title

The antimatter puzzle and how searching for electric dipole moments can help solve it

Abstract

The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics is a story of success providing an almost complete description of fundamental particles and their interactions. It's theoretical framework explains and predicts many experimental obervations remarkably well. The latest most popular example being the observation of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 about half a century after it was predicted. As of yet there is little evidence to challenge the SM. However, there are experimental observations that can currently not be fully explained within the SM framework. Puzzling questions are what the nature of dark matter is, what dark energy is and why our Universe consists almost exclusively of matter with miniscule amounts of antimatter being present. The latter represents a fundamental question about which processes were favouring matter over antimatter in the evolution of the early Universe. The result is a baryon asymmetry in our Universe, i.e. a tremendous excess of matter, quantified by observation of the cosmic microwave background and Big Bang nucleosynthesis and falling short of the SM expectation by about eight orders of magnitude! This puzzle of the missing antimatter is deeply related to fundamental symmetries of nature. Researchers around the world are working on experimental tests of fundamental symmetries to help solving the mystery of the baryon asymmetry. Eventually these tests will reveal new physics beyond the SM and lead to a more complete theory. In this lecture I will introduce experiments searching for electric dipole moments (EDMs), a particularly active field of fundamental symmetry tests. EDM searches are using elementary particles, like neutrons, as well as complex atomic and molecular systems. While sharing similar technical challenges the scale of these experiments can range from superior table-top experiments with atoms to large facilities for next generation experiments using neutrons. These experiments are measuring


Short bio

Dr. Florian Kuchler is a Research Associate at TRIUMF, where the TRIUMF ultracold advanced neutron (TUCAN) collaboration is planning to install a next generation neutron EDM experiment using a new strong ultracold neutron source being currently developed. During his PhD in Peter Fierlinger's group at the Technical University of Munich, Germany he developed a protoype cryostat for a novel EDM search using polarized droplets of liquid xenon and evaluated the potential of the new experimental method. He obtained his PhD in 2014 and continued as a postdoctoral fellow in the same group, working on the HeXeEDM experiment. The HeXeEDM experiment is based on a clock-comparison between two polarized noble gas species (3-He and 129-Xe) with the goal to measure the EDM of 129-Xe using 3-He as a comagnetometer. He moved to TRIUMF in 2016, where he's working on the high-voltage test setup for the TUCAN neutron EDM experiment, operation of the protoype source of ultracold neutrons and development of the new TUCAN source. Since his PhD he built experimental expertise in cryogenics, magnetic shielding, polarizing noble gases using spin-exchange optical pumping and low-noise SQUID detection of spin precession signals. His research is focused on applying these techniques to improve precision


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