Hi GAPS Community!

A reminder that there will be the GAPS Hour with Thursday’s colloquium speaker taking place in the cafeteria directly after the colloquium: Thurs. @ 3pm in the cafeteria.

The colloquium speaker is a new professor at University of Washington, who was previously an RA at UW before a successful professor application, so there are opportunities to chat about both research and career path. He works on both ATLAS and PIONEER, and is a very nice, approachable guy.

Hope to see you there! The colloquium details are attached below.

Your GAPS

Location: MOB Auditorium

Speaker: Quentin Buat (University of Washington)

Title: PIONEER

Abstract: The electron, the first elementary particle to be discovered, holds a unique place in science as it plays a key role in numerous physical phenomena from electricity to chemistry. Its heavier cousins, the muon and tau are at first sight simple copies of the electron: versions of the same particle in a different flavor, governed by the same interaction rules. This fundamental principle of Flavor Universality is a centerpiece of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. PIONEER is a new experiment set to challenge this principle by studying the rarest decays of the charged pion. With this new apparatus, we aim to improve the rare pion decay measurements up to 15-fold over the current ones and probe the Standard Model at energy scales beyond the reach of colliders. Our experiment design benefits from past-generation experiments and employs emergent technologies in tracking and calorimetry. In this talk, I will discuss the physics case of the experiment, review its conceptual design and present the ongoing R&D effort toward building the detector for the first phase of the project.