Starting in academic year 2013/2014, the research group hosts a regular series of seminars, dedicated to our wide audience that includes physicists, students and engineers. These seminars feature excellent overviews presented by distinguished speakers and provide high value educational material for students . They prove to be the optimal venue for fruitful discussions between external experts and the group members.
The EPP seminars are registered as Specialist Course in Particle and Astroparticle Physics, co-organised by the Doctoral School of Natural Sciences of the UGent. The program for academic year 2019-2020 can be found below:
February 4th, 2020
(11.00 am, Campus Proeftuin – N3 lecture room)
Speakers: Drs. Margot and Jan-Simon Hennig
Mirrors and Mirror Suspensions for Gravitational Wave DetectionAbstract: The mirrors and mirror suspensions facilitated in Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo are one of the key components that enabled the direct detection of gravitational waves. In this presentation we will explain the basic principle behind gravitational wave detection and highlight limitations due to external and internal noise sources. We will show how mirror suspensions can be used to mitigate some of these noise sources and will highlight key features based on our own research experience. The Einstein Telescope will make use of the same techniques, yet some parts in the detector design are still to be decided upon. As an example for an R&D experiment towards ET we will briefly highlight the direct measurement of coating Brownian noise. We will finish with a short overview of next generation detector design.
December 9, 2019
(11.00 am, Campus Proeftuin – N3 lecture room)
Speaker: Dr. Bora Akgun (CERN)
CMS High-Granularity CalorimeterThe CMS experiment at CERN will undergo significant improvements to cope with a 5-fold increase in instantaneous luminosity for the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). In particular the endcap calorimetry will suffer from very high radiation levels and unprecedented event pileup. The CMS HGCAL is being designed to replace the existing CMS endcap electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters. It will be a sampling calorimeter, featuring unprecedented transverse and longitudinal readout and trigger segmentation for both electromagnetic (CE-E) and hadronic (CE-H) compartments. This will facilitate particle-flow calorimetry, where the fine structure of showers can be measured and used to enhance pileup rejection and particle identification, whilst still achieving good energy resolution. The CE-E and a large fraction of CE-H will use hexagonal silicon sensors as active detector material. The lower-radiation environment will be instrumented with scintillator tiles with on-tile SiPM readout. An overview of the HGCAL project will be presented, covering motivation, engineering design, readout and trigger concepts, and performance in beams and in simulation.
November 26, 2019
(11.00 am, Campus Proeftuin – N3 lecture room)
Speaker: Dr. Jean-Roch Vilmant (Caltech, US)
Advancing Particle Physics with Deep LearningOver the last decade deep learning has achieved over-human performance at solving pattern recognition tasks in image, video, text, speech processing. This success was made possible by the conjunction of the creation of large labelled dataset, advance in numerical techniques and increased computation power with the use of GPU. It is a vibrant field of research and experimentation, with significant interest and buy-in from industry. Machine learning has been in operation since long in particle physics and deep learning methods have recently played significant role in physics analysis. R&D efforts are on-going in particle physics to further improve our physics reach, or find alternative to computing intensive task in data processing. I will provide an introduction to machine learning together with an overview of good practices in applying such techniques. I will present successful applications of deep learning to particle physics problems, and conclude on an open review of on-going R&D.
