Our understanding of the origin of heavy elements by the r-process has made great progress in the last years. In addition to the gravitational wave and kilonova observations for GW170817, there have been major advances in the hydrodynamical simulations of neutron star mergers and core-collapse supernovae, in the microphysics included in those simulations (neutrinos and high density equation of...
Nuclear forces that govern the atomic nuclei are still not fully understood. The state-of-the-art nuclear theories are dealing with the complexity of the nuclear systems governed by many
degrees of freedom. In order to shed light to these advance models, nuclear spectroscopy has been proven to be of outmost importance to obtained experimental information of key nuclear observables.
From the...
The description of the proton properties from its quark and gluon substructure is a topic which is far from being well understood. The strong force binding together the constituents behaves remarkably differently at high and low energies.
The main experimental tool to probe the proton is electron scattering off proton targets. At high energies, the electrons break up the protons and the...
SCK CEN is at the forefront of Heavy Liquid Metal (HLM) nuclear technology worldwide with the development of the MYRRHA accelerator driven system (ADS) since 1998.
MYRRHA is conceived as a flexible fast-spectrum research irradiation facility cooled by Lead Bismuth Eutectic (LBE). The nominal design power of the MYRRHA reactor is 70 MWth. It is driven in sub-critical mode by a high power...
The interplay between the experimental results generated in terrestrial laboratories and the observations coming from stellar objects is of fundamental importance for offering solutions to long-standing puzzles in the physics of strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions. In this talk I will present the work I have been developing over the years regarding dense matter at finite...
We analize the role played by the thermal f0(500) state or σ in chiral symmetry restoration and propose an alternative sector (related with the thermal K∗0(700) or κ) to study O(4)×UA(1) restoration. The temperature corrections to the spectral properties of those states are included in order to provide a better description of the scalar susceptibilities χS and χκS around the transition region....
We study the dependence of hadronic resonances on the mass of quarks through the analysis of data from QCD lattice simulations form various collaborations. Using Machine Learning techniques as the LASSO algorithm we fit lattice data in order to extrapolate them to the physical point and extract the results for the quark mass dependence for exotic resonances like Ds0 and Ds1.
Observing neutrinoless double-beta (0νββ) is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated breakthroughs in modern-day neutrino, nuclear and particle physics. When observed, the lepton-number-violating process would provide unique vistas beyond the Standard model of particle physics. However, the expected decay rates depend on coupling constants, whose effective values are under debate, and nuclear...
Neutrinoless double-beta (0νββ) decay is a hypothetical nuclear process where two neutrons transmute into two protons, with only two electrons being emitted with no accompanying antineutrinos. The measurement of such a process would imply that neutrinos are Majorana particles (their own antiparticle) and, since lepton number would not be conserved, this would point to an event beyond the...
Nucleosynthesis is an ongoing process in the cosmos which take place in various astrophysical environments such as massive stars, core-collapse supernovae or novae. One of the most famous example of evidence in the continuity of the process was the discovery of γ-ray from radioactive 26Al in 1982 [1]. More recently, an all-sky map of this characteristic 1809-keV γ-ray shows a distribution of...
Study of heavy-ion interactions using α and non-α structure beams at low energies [1-4] may provide a great deal of information on the in-complete fusion (ICF) reactions. In order to understand the dynamics of ICF reactions, several studies have been made and a large enhancement in cross section for α-emitting channels with respect to the calculations done with code PACE4[5] has been reported...
In stellar evolution, the rate of 12C(α,γ)16O reaction controls the C/O abundance ratio at the end of the helium burning phase, thus defining the further course of development. At stellar temperatures of around 300 keV, the cross section of 12C(α,γ)16O is ∼ 10−17 b, which cannot be measured using current technology. The α−capture reaction populating the natural-parity states of the residual...
The pairing interaction induces nucleon-nucleon correlations that are essential in defining the properties of finite quantum many-body systems close to their ground states. A very specific probe of this pairing component in the nuclear interactions, which ties up nucleons in a highly correlated state, the nuclear Cooper pairs, is the two-nucleon transfer reactions. How paring correlations can...
Nuclear equation of state (EOS) describes the relationship between state variables such as density, pressure and temperature of a nuclear system. It is usually expressed as the energy per nucleon of a particular nuclear medium. Constraining parameters of nuclear EOS of asymmetric nuclear matter (where asymmetry lies in proton to neutron number) is of immense importance for understanding not...
The tin (Sn; Z = 50) isotopes constitute the longest chain of semi-magic even-even nuclei between the 100Sn (N = 50) and 132Sn (N = 82) double-shell closures, seven of which, 112,114,116,118,120,122,124Sn, are stable. These isotopes have become a prototypical benchmark of extensive microscopic theory and experiment, reflected in the large number of studies investigating the decay of their...
Collinear laser spectroscopy provides access to many nuclear properties such as isotopic shifts of the nuclear mean square charge radii, spins, nuclear magnetic moments and electric quadrupole moments. As measurements are carried out on a small time scale, this method is well suited for the investigation of isotopes far from stability.
The development of many different techniques used in...
In this talk I will present my experience with the ERC grant application. I will share tips and tricks for the preparation phase, the proposal writing, and the interview. The talk will be based on my personal experience with the ERC Consolidator call 2020.
Horizon Europe establishes Gender Equality as a cross-cutting principle and aspires to eliminate gender inequality and its intersection with other socio-economic inequalities through R&I systems, including and addressing unconscious biases and systemic structural barriers.
In order to achieve Gender Equality, the integration of the gender dimension into R&I content is mandatory and is a...
In March 2013 the COST Action MP1210 The String Theory Universe was initiated for a duration of four years. The objectives were mainly scientific, but we were comitted to take a series of actions to address the problems that women that want to pursue a scientific career confront.
Given the huge imbalance in the area (only 15% of the Action members were women) we thought that the problems were...
Organization of gender-balanced events: a case of practice, National Meeting in Optics 2021
Speaker: Martina Delgado-Pinar, Vice Chair of the Women in Optics and Photonics Committee of SEDOPTICA, in representation of the organizing committee of RNO2021
https://www.rno2021.es/#comite-organizador
A clear example of the gender imbalance in STEM fields is the under-representation of women...
Motherhood has a huge impact on the careers of women scientists. With regards to the impact of family life on the work of male and female researchers, the evidence shown here indicates that having children clearly seems to be detrimental to a woman’s career in science. For men, however, if family does have an effect on their work, this effect is more positive than negative. It seems to be...
PRECEDER (Prediction of the Electrical Behavior of Electronic Devices under Radiation, Spanish acronym) is a new concept in the strategy of ensuring the radiation hardness in electronics, developed by our group. The idea is based on the use of archival data to assess the risk associated to radiation environments without irradiation testing needs. A critical step of Radiation Hardness Assurance...
In the last decades, our society has become more interdependent and complex than ever before. Local impacts can cause global issues, as the current pandemic clearly shows, affecting the health of millions of human beings. It is also highly dependent on relevant technological structures, such as communications, transport, or power distribution networks, which can be very vulnerable to the...
In this talk, we will present the application of machine learning techniques to address many medical physics problems such as positron range correction in PET, dose estimation in radiotherapy planning, the guidance of ultrasound acquisitions, tissue segmentation, automatic lesion detection… We will focus on the risks and potential benefits of these new techniques compared to current standard...
High gradient radiofrequency (RF) accelerating cavities are one of the main research lines in the development of compact linear accelerators. A particular focus of these structures is for medical hadron therapy applications. However, the operation of such cavities is currently limited by nonlinear electromagnetic effects that are intensified at high electric fields, such as dark currents and...
The term Tensor Network (TN) States designates a number of ansatzes that can efficiently represent certain states of quantum many-body systems. In particular, ground states and thermal equilibrium of local Hamiltonians, and, to some extent, real time evolution can be numerically studied with TN methods. Quantum information theory provides tools to understand why they are good ansatzes for...
My name is Elsa Prada and I am a theorist with 20 year experience in condensed matter physics. I am interested in systems where quantum phenomena play an important role, such as low dimensional materials and nanostructures, and the technological applications we can derive from such quantum properties. This is nowadays dubbed the field of "Quantum Technologies". During my career I have worked...
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging constitutes the molecular imaging technique of excellence and is used to evaluate a radio-tracer uptake by an organ. To obtain PET images, patients are injected with radioisotopes that decay inside the patient body emitting a positron that subsequently annihilates with a core electron of the patient body, emitting two opposite 511 keV gamma-rays. PET...
In recent years, a great experimental effort has led to the discovery of some exotic states found in the charmonium and bottomonium spectra. Some examples of such states are the Zc(3900), Zc(4020), Zcs(3985), Zb(10610) and Zb(10650). These states do not fit the conventional qq¯ quark model given that they contain hidden-charm (cc¯) or hidden-bottom (bb¯) components, but they are also found to...
With the increasing sensitivity and precision of resonant Schottky detectors, this technology becomes more valuable in the determination of masses and lifetimes of the yet unstudied nuclei inside heavy ion storage rings but also in general storage ring physics. At present, information from these detectors is gained by high-end units with software and hardware interface that are not versatile...
In this presentation, we analyse how gender stereotypes influence the choice of professional career. In particular, we discuss how patriarchal social conditioning implies a lower presence of women in science. We depict possible measures to achieve greater equity in an area as masculinized as the scientific one.
Medical imaging has been one of the main tools employed during the COVID-19 pandemic for diagnosis and disease progression assessment. The most commonly used have been Chest X-Rays (CXR) and Computed Tomography (CT). However, CXR has a limited sensibility, while CT is more expensive, less accessible, gives more dose to the patients, and requires sanitizing the scanner after each patient...
The parton-level kinematics plays a crucial role for understanding the internal structure of hadrons and improving the precision of the calculations. To better understand the kinematics at the partonic level, we study the production of one hadron and a direct photon, including up to Next-to-Leading Order Quantum Chromodynamics and Leading-Order Quantum Electrodynamics corrections. Using a...
In this work we study the Σπ and Λπ production off free nucleons driven by the strangeness-changing weak charged current. We calculate the total cross sections for all possible channels and estimate the flux-averaged total cross sections for experiments like MiniBooNE, SciBooNE, T2K, and Minerva. The model is based on the lowest order effective SU(3) chiral Lagrangians in the presence of an...
Supernova (SN) explosions are one of the most energetic events in the observable universe.
Given that, they are the best natural laboratories to investigate extreme physical phenomena, that otherwise would not be reproducible on Earth.
During these powerful explosions chemical elements are also produced, that go to enrich the amount of heavy elements in the interstellar...
NEXT (Neutrino Experiment with a Xenon TPC) is a double beta decay experiment located in Huesca (Spain) at the Laboratorio Subterraneo de Canfranc (LSC). It searches for the neutrino-less double beta decay (ββ0ν) of 136Xe, a lepton-number-violation process that would prove the Majorana nature of neutrinos and eventually provide handles for a measurement of the neutrino absolute mass. The...
ANAIS (Annual modulation with NaI Scintillators) is a direct dark matter detection experiment whose goal is to confirm or refute in a model independent way the highly controversial positive annual modulation signal reported by DAMA/LIBRA collaboration for more than twenty cycles. ANAIS-112, consisting of 112.5 kg of NaI(Tl) scintillators, is presently in data taking phase at the Canfranc...
In this work, we provide a simple model that studies the probability to obtain a given hierarchy between two scales. In particular, we work in a theory with a light SU(2)L sector and a heavy SU(2)H sector, and two scalar doublets with each one corresponding to one sector. Furthermore, both sectors can interact by means of a U(1)X. By the Coleman-Weinberg mechanism, the gauge bosons and scalars...
In 2019 the LHCb experiment discovered for the first time a clear signal of direct CP violation in the charm sector, in particular in the decays of D0 mesons to π+π− and K+K−. However, the theoretical determination of the strong part of the related decay amplitudes in the SM remains uncertain, mainly due to the difficulties when dealing with charmed hadronic asymptotic states. A long-known...
Interest in searches for heavy neutral leptons (HNLs) at the LHC has increased considerably in the past few years. In the minimal scenario, HNLs are produced and decay via their mixing with active neutrinos in the Standard Model (SM) spectrum. However, many SM extensions with HNLs have been discussed in the literature, which sometimes change expectations for LHC sensitivities drastically. In...
Unveiling the nature of dark matter is one of the major endeavors of our century.
The search for dark matter is developed across multiple channels and with different techniques.
In particular, indirect searches aim at disentangling dark matter signals above the largely dominant astrophysical background in the flux of cosmic particles, such as charged cosmic rays and gamma rays. Limits on the...
Understanding the nature of the Dark Matter has shown to be one of the biggest challenges faced in the XXI century by Cosmology, Astrophysics and Particle Physics. It will require following complementary approaches. Among them, dark matter direct detection strategy has developed since the eighties of the past century, increasing strongly the detection sensitivity by introducing new detection...
The combined result of a number of experiments demonstrated that neutrinos have mass and oscillate, and experimentalists have made enormous progress in measuring neutrino properties. However fundamental questions about neutrinos remain: Is the neutrino its own antiparticle? What is the absolute scale of neutrino masses? How are the three neutrino mass states ordered from lightest to heaviest...
In this talk I will present a brief overview of the current gravitational wave detections and some of the most important consequences we can derive. I will also mention the plans for the forthcoming observation runs. In the last part of the talk I will comment on how mathematics can contribute in the field of gravitational wave astronomy, focusing on formulations of General Relativity,...
The Cosmic Microwave Background temperature and polarization anisotropy measurements have provided strong confirmation of the LCDM model of structure formation. Even if this model can explain incredibly well the observations in a vast range of scales and epochs, with the increase of the experimental sensitivity, a few interesting tensions between the cosmological probes, and anomalies in the...
Supernova (SN) explosions are the most powerful cosmic factories of all-flavors, MeV-scale, neutrinos. Their detection is of great importance not only for astrophysics, but also to shed light on neutrino properties. Since the first observation of a SN neutrino signal in the 1987, the international network of SN neutrinos observatories has been greatly expanded, in order to detect the next...
Since 2015 the international advanced gravitational wave detector network has confidently detected tens of short transient signals, whose sources have been identified as mergers of compact objects, primarily binary systems of black holes. The main goal of this talk will be to discuss the phenomenon of precession in black hole binaries, as well as the first steps to further improve its...
New gauge bosons coupling to leptons are simple and well-motivated extensions of the StandardModel. We study the sensitivity to gauged L_\mu−L_e, L_e−L_\tau and L_\mu−L_\tau both with the existing beam dump mode data of MiniBooNE and with the DUNE near detector. We find that including bremsstrahlung and resonant production of Z^\prime which decays toe±andμ±final states leads to a significant...
Pulsars are spinning neutron stars which emit an electromagnetic beam. We expect pulsars to slowly decrease their rotational frequency due to the radiation emission. However, sudden increases of the rotational frequency have been observed from different pulsars. These events are called “glitches”, and are followed by a relaxation phase with timescales from days to months. Gravitational-wave...
When gravitational waves propagate near massive objects, they are deflected as a result of gravitational lensing. This phenomenon is already known for electromagnetic waves, and it is expected for gravitational waves to be a promising new instrument in astrophysics. When the time delay between the different paths is comparable with the wave’s period, interference and diffraction appear due to...
In the context of lepton flavor universality violation (LFUV) studies, we study different observables related to the b→cτν¯τ semileptonic decays. These observables are expected to help in distinguishing between different NP scenarios. Since the τ lepton is very short-lived, we consider three subsequent τ-decay modes, two hadronic πντ and ρντ and one leptonic μν¯μντ, which have been previously...
There is a potentially detectable background of stochastic gravitational waves produced by thermal sources in the Universe. In this work, we provide the first computation of the gravitational-wave spectrum emitted by a thermal plasma in a strongly-coupled theory: strongly-coupled N=4 Super Yang Mills. Given the non-applicability of perturbative methods in strong coupling computations, we...
The existence of dark sectors is an exciting possibility to explain the origin of Dark Matter (DM). In addition to gravity, DM could interact with ordinary matter through a new very weak force. This new interaction could be mediated by a new massive vector boson, called dark photon (A’). If A’ exists, it could be produced through the kinetic mixing with a bremsstrahlung photon from a...
In this talk, we present a re-analysis of different black hole merger gravitational wave events detected by the LIGO and Virgo interferometers with state-of-art phenomenological waveform models, IMRPhenomX and IMRPhenomT, which include higher spherical harmonics and spin precession. Due to their rapid and accurate evaluation of the waveforms, but also an automatisation of our Bayesian...
Exploring the mechanism that explains the origin of the masses of elementary particles, fermions and gauge bosons, remains one of the main objectives of the Particle Physics program of the LHC. One experimental probe consists of measuring the strength of the interaction between the Higgs boson and the Top quark, named top-Yukawa coupling, using the full dataset collected by the ATLAS...
Primordial black holes (PBHs) are potential dark matter candidates whose masses can span over many orders of magnitude. If they have masses in the 1015−1017 g range, they can emit sizeable fluxes of MeV neutrinos through evaporation via Hawking radiation. We explore the possibility of detecting light (non-)rotating PBHs with future neutrino experiments. We show that future neutrino experiments...
The Peccei-Quinn solution to the strong CP problem has a problematic aspect: it relies on a global U(1) symmetry which, although broken at low energy by the QCD anomaly, must be an extremely good symmetry of high-energy physics. This issue is known as the Peccei-Quinn quality problem. We propose a model where the Peccei-Quinn symmetry arises accidentally and is respected up to high-dimensional...
The fact that the top quark’s lifetime is smaller than its hadronization and depolarization timescales makes its production and decay kinematic properties an important probe of physical processes beyond the Standard Model (SM). The challenging analysis of the fully differential top-quark decay will probe the tWb vertex structure using single-top-quark events at a center-of-mass energy of 13...
Particle Physics' experiments are currently searching for events whose probability is extremely low, such as the neutrinoless double beta decay or dark matter candidates such as WIMPs. This is what causes the need to perform highly sensitive experiments in subterranean facilities that shield from cosmic rays and environmental radiation. However, there is a radiation which is always present,...
We estimate the sensitivity of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) to detect diffuse gamma-ray emission from the Perseus galaxy cluster, both from interactions of cosmic rays (CR) with the intra-cluster medium, or as a product of annihilation or decay of dark matter (DM) particles in case they are weakly interactive massive particles (WIMPs). The observation of Perseus constitutes one of the...
In this talk we present a quantum algorithm application for Feynman loop integrals. We propose a proper modification of Grover's algorithm for the identification of causal singular configurations of multiloop Feynman diagrams. The quantum algorithm is implemented in two different quantum simulators, the output obtained is directly translated to causal thresholds needed for the causal...
In these talk we highlight the main results about dark matter (DM) search in dwarf irregular galaxies with the Fermi Large Area Telescope. We analyze 11 years of Fermi-LAT data corresponding to the sky regions of 7 dwarf irregular (dIrr) galaxies. DIrrs are DM dominated systems, recently proposed as interesting targets for the indirect search of DM with gamma-rays. We create a spatial template...
In this talk I will explain how the polarization of photons emitted by astrophysical sources might be altered as they travel through a medium of dark matter composed of ultra light axion-like particles (ALPs). I will describe a new, more robust, analysis we delevoped to search for this effect. Afterwards, I will show the resulting strong limits on the axion-photon coupling for a wide range of...
We fit galactic rotation curves obtained by SPARC from dark matter haloes that are
not spherically symmetric, but allowed to become prolate or oblate with a higher-
multipole density distribution. This is motivated by observing that the flattening of
v(r)=constant is the natural Kepler law due to a filamentary rather than a spherical
source, so that elongating the distribution could bring...
In this work, we carry out a suite of specially-designed numerical simulations to shed further light on dark matter (DM) subhalo survival at mass scales relevant for gamma-ray DM searches, a topic subject to intense debate nowadays. Specifically, we have developed and employed an improved version of DASH, a GPU N-body code, to study the evolution of low-mass subhaloes inside a Milky Way-like...
Neutrinos are the most elusive particles in the Standard Model. Despite being so abundant in the Universe, we still do not know many of their properties: how massive are they? how many neutrinos are there? is there CP violation in the leptonic sector? do they have a connection to the dark matter, or new interactions that we are unaware of? In this talk I will present an overview of neutrino...
Finding the organising principle of the flavour sector is one of the big challenges in particle physics:
a) why are there three generations of fermions?
b) why is the up quark about 100,000 times lighter than the top quark, although they have the same gauge quantum numbers?
c) why do the three generations of quarks hardly mix, whereas the three lepton generations have large mixing?
d) could...
One of the goals of particle physics is to explain the structure of matter at the smallest distance scales. For decades, the properties of the basic building blocks of matter have been investigated in ever greater detail. However, even today some profound but simple questions, such as the origins of dark matter in the universe, remain unanswered. The attempt to understand the material world...
Discovering the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment at CERN
Would you like to know what we do at the European Organization for Nuclear Research with proton collisions?
Learn about amazing physics driven by high level physicists from all over the world.
Discover a huge breadth of research topics, from the discovery of the Higgs boson to searches of the unknown.
In the last few years flavor experiments have been reporting deviations with respect to the expected predictions from the Standard Model. These anomalies share some patterns of lepton flavor universality violation and seem to suggest new physics at the (hopeful) TeV scale. Many attempts have been already pursued in our community trying to understand these signals, employing from any sort of...
In this work, we provide a simple model that studies the probability to obtain a given hierarchy between two scales. In particular, we work in a theory with a light $SU(2)_L$ sector and a heavy $SU(2)_H$ sector, and two scalar doublets with each one corresponding to one sector. Furthermore, both sectors can interact by means of a $U(1)_X$. By the Coleman-Weinberg mechanism, the gauge bosons...
Medical imaging has been one of the main tools employed during the COVID-19 pandemic for diagnosis and disease progression assessment. The most commonly used have been Chest X-Rays (CXR) and Computed Tomography (CT). However, CXR has a limited sensibility, while CT is more expensive, less accessible, gives more dose to the patients, and requires sanitizing the scanner after each patient...
In this talk we present a quantum algorithm application for Feynman loop integrals. We propose a proper modification of Grover's algorithm for the identification of causal singular configurations of multiloop Feynman diagrams. The quantum algorithm is implemented in two different quantum simulators, the output obtained is directly translated to causal thresholds needed for the causal...
In this talk, we will present the application of machine learning techniques to address many medical physics problems such as positron range correction in PET, dose estimation in radiotherapy planning, the guidance of ultrasound acquisitions, tissue segmentation, automatic lesion detection… We will focus on the risks and potential benefits of these new techniques compared to current standard...
The Peccei-Quinn solution to the strong CP problem has a problematic aspect: it relies on a global U(1) symmetry which, although broken at low energy by the QCD anomaly, must be an extremely good symmetry of high-energy physics. This issue is known as the Peccei-Quinn quality problem. We propose a model where the Peccei-Quinn symmetry arises accidentally and is respected up to high-dimensional...
PRECEDER (Prediction of the Electrical Behavior of Electronic Devices under Radiation, Spanish acronym) is a new concept in the strategy of ensuring the radiation hardness in electronics, developed by our group. The idea is based on the use of archival data to assess the risk associated to radiation environments without irradiation testing needs. A critical step of Radiation Hardness Assurance...
In this work we study the Σπ and Λπ production off free nucleons driven by the strangeness-changing weak charged current. We calculate the total cross sections for all possible channels and estimate the flux-averaged total cross sections for experiments like MiniBooNE, SciBooNE, T2K, and Minerva. The model is based on the lowest order effective SU(3) chiral Lagrangians in the presence of an...
ANAIS (Annual modulation with NaI Scintillators) is a direct dark matter detection experiment whose goal is to confirm or refute in a model independent way the highly controversial positive annual modulation signal reported by DAMA/LIBRA collaboration for more than twenty cycles. ANAIS-112, consisting of 112.5 kg of NaI(Tl) scintillators, is presently in data taking phase at the Canfranc...
ANAIS (Annual modulation with NaI Scintillators) is a direct dark matter detection experiment whose goal is to confirm or refute in a model independent way the highly controversial positive annual modulation signal reported by DAMA/LIBRA collaboration for more than twenty cycles. ANAIS-112, consisting of 112.5 kg of NaI(Tl) scintillators, is presently in data taking phase at the Canfranc...
Collinear laser spectroscopy provides access to many nuclear properties such as isotopic shifts of the nuclear mean square charge radii, spins, nuclear magnetic moments and electric quadrupole moments. As measurements are carried out on a small time scale, this method is well suited for the investigation of isotopes far from stability.
The development of many different techniques used in...
Supernova (SN) explosions are one of the most energetic events in the observable universe.
Given that, they are the best natural laboratories to investigate extreme physical phenomena, that otherwise would not be reproducible on Earth.
During these powerful explosions chemical elements are also produced, that go to enrich the amount of heavy elements in the interstellar...
In 2019 the LHCb experiment discovered for the first time a clear signal of direct CP violation in the charm sector, in particular in the decays of $D^0$ mesons to $\pi^+\pi^-$ and $K^+K^-$. However, the theoretical determination of the strong part of the related decay amplitudes in the SM remains uncertain, mainly due to the difficulties when dealing with charmed hadronic asymptotic states. A...
Study of heavy-ion interactions using $\alpha$ and non-$\alpha$ structure beams at low energies [1-4] may provide a great deal of information on the in-complete fusion (ICF) reactions. In order to understand the dynamics of ICF reactions, several studies have been made and a large enhancement in cross section for $\alpha$-emitting channels with respect to the calculations done with code...
Particle Physics' experiments are currently searching for events whose probability is extremely low, such as the neutrinoless double beta decay or dark matter candidates such as WIMPs. This is what causes the need to perform highly sensitive experiments in subterranean facilities that shield from cosmic rays and environmental radiation. However, there is a radiation which is always present,...
Understanding the nature of the Dark Matter has shown to be one of the biggest challenges faced in the XXI century by Cosmology, Astrophysics and Particle Physics. It will require following complementary approaches. Among them, dark matter direct detection strategy has developed since the eighties of the past century, increasing strongly the detection sensitivity by introducing new detection...
New gauge bosons coupling to leptons are simple and well-motivated extensions of the StandardModel. We study the sensitivity to gauged $L_\mu−L_e$, $L_e−L_\tau$ and $L_\mu−L_\tau$ both with the existing beam dump mode data of MiniBooNE and with the DUNE near detector. We find that including bremsstrahlung and resonant production of $Z^\prime$ which decays toe±andμ±final states leads to a...
In the last decades, our society has become more interdependent and complex than ever before. Local impacts can cause global issues, as the current pandemic clearly shows, affecting the health of millions of human beings. It is also highly dependent on relevant technological structures, such as communications, transport, or power distribution networks, which can be very vulnerable to the...
In this presentation, we analyse how gender stereotypes influence the choice of professional career. In particular, we discuss how patriarchal social conditioning implies a lower presence of women in science. We depict possible measures to achieve greater equity in an area as masculinized as the scientific one.
In this talk I will present a brief overview of the current gravitational wave detections and some of the most important consequences we can derive. I will also mention the plans for the forthcoming observation runs. In the last part of the talk I will comment on how mathematics can contribute in the field of gravitational wave astronomy, focusing on formulations of General Relativity,...
With the increasing sensitivity and precision of resonant Schottky detectors, this technology becomes more valuable in the determination of masses and lifetimes of the yet unstudied nuclei inside heavy ion storage rings but also in general storage ring physics. At present, information from these detectors is gained by high-end units with software and hardware interface that are not versatile...
Neutrinoless double-beta (0νββ) decay is a hypothetical nuclear process where two neutrons transmute into two protons, with only two electrons being emitted with no accompanying antineutrinos. The measurement of such a process would imply that neutrinos are Majorana particles (their own antiparticle) and, since lepton number would not be conserved, this would point to an event beyond the...
When gravitational waves propagate near massive objects, they are deflected as a result of gravitational lensing. This phenomenon is already known for electromagnetic waves, and it is expected for gravitational waves to be a promising new instrument in astrophysics. When the time delay between the different paths is comparable with the wave’s period, interference and diffraction appear due to...
The fact that the top quark’s lifetime is smaller than its hadronization and depolarization timescales makes its production and decay kinematic properties an important probe of physical processes beyond the Standard Model (SM). The challenging analysis of the fully differential top-quark decay will probe the tWb vertex structure using single-top-quark events at a center-of-mass energy of 13...
The tin (Sn; Z = 50) isotopes constitute the longest chain of semi-magic even-even nuclei between the 100Sn (N = 50) and 132Sn (N = 82) double-shell closures, seven of which, 112,114,116,118,120,122,124Sn, are stable. These isotopes have become a prototypical benchmark of extensive microscopic theory and experiment, reflected in the large number of studies investigating the decay of their...
Observing neutrinoless double-beta ($0\nu\beta\beta$) is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated breakthroughs in modern-day neutrino, nuclear and particle physics. When observed, the lepton-number-violating process would provide unique vistas beyond the Standard model of particle physics. However, the expected decay rates depend on coupling constants, whose effective values are under debate,...
Our understanding of the origin of heavy elements by the r-process has made great progress in the last years. In addition to the gravitational wave and kilonova observations for GW170817, there have been major advances in the hydrodynamical simulations of neutron star mergers and core-collapse supernovae, in the microphysics included in those simulations (neutrinos and high density equation...
In this talk, we present a re-analysis of different black hole merger gravitational wave events detected by the LIGO and Virgo interferometers with state-of-art phenomenological waveform models, IMRPhenomX and IMRPhenomT, which include higher spherical harmonics and spin precession. Due to their rapid and accurate evaluation of the waveforms, but also an automatisation of our Bayesian...
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging constitutes the molecular imaging technique of excellence and is used to evaluate a radio-tracer uptake by an organ. To obtain PET images, patients are injected with radioisotopes that decay inside the patient body emitting a positron that subsequently annihilates with a core electron of the patient body, emitting two opposite 511 keV gamma-rays. PET...
Since 2015 the international advanced gravitational wave detector network has confidently detected tens of short transient signals, whose sources have been identified as mergers of compact objects, primarily binary systems of black holes. The main goal of this talk will be to discuss the phenomenon of precession in black hole binaries, as well as the first steps to further improve its...
The description of the proton properties from its quark and gluon substructure is a topic which is far from being well understood. The strong force binding together the constituents behaves remarkably differently at high and low energies.
The main experimental tool to probe the proton is electron scattering off proton targets. At high energies, the electrons break up the protons and the...
In this talk I will explain how the polarization of photons emitted by astrophysical sources might be altered as they travel through a medium of dark matter composed of ultra light axion-like particles (ALPs). I will describe a new, more robust, analysis we delevoped to search for this effect. Afterwards, I will show the resulting strong limits on the axion-photon coupling for a wide range of...
Pulsars are spinning neutron stars which emit an electromagnetic beam. We expect pulsars to slowly decrease their rotational frequency due to the radiation emission. However, sudden increases of the rotational frequency have been observed from different pulsars. These events are called “glitches”, and are followed by a relaxation phase with timescales from days to months. Gravitational-wave...
The pairing interaction induces nucleon-nucleon correlations that are essential in defining the properties of finite quantum many-body systems close to their ground states. A very specific probe of this pairing component in the nuclear interactions, which ties up nucleons in a highly correlated state, the nuclear Cooper pairs, is the two-nucleon transfer reactions. How paring correlations can...
In this work, we carry out a suite of specially-designed numerical simulations to shed further light on dark matter (DM) subhalo survival at mass scales relevant for gamma-ray DM searches, a topic subject to intense debate nowadays. Specifically, we have developed and employed an improved version of DASH, a GPU N-body code, to study the evolution of low-mass subhaloes inside a Milky Way-like...
Primordial black holes (PBHs) are potential dark matter candidates whose masses can span over many orders of magnitude. If they have masses in the 10$^{15}$−10$^{17}$ g range, they can emit sizeable fluxes of MeV neutrinos through evaporation via Hawking radiation. We explore the possibility of detecting light (non-)rotating PBHs with future neutrino experiments. We show that future neutrino...
PETALO (Positron Emission TOF Apparatus with Liquid xenOn) is a new concept that seeks to demonstrate that liquid xenon (LXe) together with a SiPM-based readout and fast electronics, provide a significant improvement in the field of medical imaging with PET-TOF. Liquid xenon allows a continuous medium with a uniform response avoiding most of the geometrical distortions of conventional...
In March 2013 the COST Action MP1210 The String Theory Universe was initiated for a duration of four years. The objectives were mainly scientific, but we were comitted to take a series of actions to address the problems that women that want to pursue a scientific career confront.
Given the huge imbalance in the area (only 15% of the Action members were women) we thought that the problems...
The interplay between the experimental results generated in terrestrial laboratories and the observations coming from stellar objects is of fundamental importance for offering solutions to long-standing puzzles in the physics of strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions. In this talk I will present the work I have been developing over the years regarding dense matter at finite...
In stellar evolution, the rate of $ ^{12}$C($ \alpha$,$ \gamma$)$ ^{16}$O reaction controls the C/O abundance ratio at the end of the helium burning phase, thus defining the further course of development. At stellar temperatures of around 300 keV, the cross section of $^{12}$C($\alpha$,$\gamma$)$^{16}$O is $\sim$ 10$^{-17}$ b, which cannot be measured using current technology. The...
In recent years, a great experimental effort has led to the discovery of some exotic states found in the charmonium and bottomonium spectra. Some examples of such states are the $Z_c(3900)$, $Z_c(4020)$, $Z_{cs}(3985)$, $Z_b(10610)$ and $Z_b(10650)$. These states do not fit the conventional $q \bar q$ quark model given that they contain hidden-charm ($c \bar c$) or hidden-bottom ($b\bar b$)...
There is a potentially detectable background of stochastic gravitational waves produced by thermal sources in the Universe. In this work, we provide the first computation of the gravitational-wave spectrum emitted by a thermal plasma in a strongly-coupled theory: strongly-coupled $\mathcal N$=4 Super Yang Mills. Given the non-applicability of perturbative methods in strong coupling...
We analize the role played by the thermal $f_0(500)$ state or $\sigma$ in chiral symmetry restoration and propose an alternative sector (related with the thermal $K_0^*(700)$ or $\kappa$) to study $O(4)\times U_A(1)$ restoration. The temperature corrections to the spectral properties of those states are included in order to provide a better description of the scalar susceptibilities $\chi_S$...
My name is Elsa Prada and I am a theorist with 20 year experience in condensed matter physics. I am interested in systems where quantum phenomena play an important role, such as low dimensional materials and nanostructures, and the technological applications we can derive from such quantum properties. This is nowadays dubbed the field of "Quantum Technologies". During my career I have worked...
The goal of the ASACUSA (Atomic Spectroscopy And Collisions Using Slow Antiprotons) experiment at CERN's Antiproton Decelerator is to measure the difference of the ground state hyperfine splitting of antihydrogen and hydrogen in order to test CPT symmetry.
The ASACUSA hodoscope is an octagonal barrel-type detector consisting of plastic scintillators and read out by silicon photo multipliers...
The goal of the ASACUSA (Atomic Spectroscopy And Collisions Using Slow Antiprotons) experiment at CERN's Antiproton Decelerator is to measure the difference of the ground state hyperfine splitting of antihydrogen and hydrogen in order to test CPT symmetry.
The ASACUSA hodoscope is an octagonal barrel-type detector consisting of plastic scintillators and read out by silicon photo multipliers...
In the context of lepton flavor universality violation (LFUV) studies, we study different observables related to the $b\to c\tau\bar{\nu}_\tau$ semileptonic decays. These observables are expected to help in distinguishing between different NP scenarios. Since the $\tau$ lepton is very short-lived, we consider three subsequent $\tau$-decay modes, two hadronic $\pi\nu_\tau$ and $\rho\nu_\tau$...
