HEP Monday Seminar Abstracts



October 19, 2009
           Robert Bernstein, Fermilab, A New High Sensitivity Search for Muon-to-Electron Conversion at Fermilab 

 The Mu2e collaboration will search for coherent, neutrino-less conversion of muons into electrons in the field of a nucleus with a sensitivity improvement of approximately 10,000
over existing limits. Such a lepton flavor-violating reaction probes new physics at a scale unavailable by direct searches at either present or planned high energy colliders. The physics
motivation for Mu2e and the design of the muon beamline and spectrometer will be presented, along with a scheme by which the experiment can be mounted in the present Fermilab
accelerator complex. We will also examine the prospects for increased sensitivity of as much as two orders-of-magnitude at the proposed Fermilab Project X Linac.


**Tuesday**, October 27, 2009 - 248 Lauritsen.
	      Robert Nelson, CU-Boulder, A Measurement of Neutrino Induced Charged Current Neutral Pion Production at MiniBooNE

The Mini-Booster-Neutrino-Experiment at Fermilab has recorded the largest sample of muon neutrino interactions (~400,000) at the 1 GeV scale on a nuclear target (CH2) to date.  
This allows for the precise measurement of many neutrino cross-sections that will aid in the understanding of event rates in future oscillation searches (such as T2K).  I will discuss
an overview of the MiniBooNE suite of cross-section measurements with particular focus on charged current neutral pion production (CCpi0). This measurement required the design
of a specialty fitter to reconstruct the muon and the pion in the event where the pion is found from the Cherenkov rings produced by its daughter photons.  This fitter reconstructs all 
three Cherenkov rings in the event.  This allows for the measurement of many kinematic  quantities, most importantly the incident neutrino's energy.  With this measurement we can
report various, previously unmeasured,  differential cross-sections along with the total CCpi0 cross-section as a function of neutrino energy.

November 2, 2009
           Daniel Whiteson,  UCI, CDF in its prime: searches for b', Z' and friends 

I will argue that new physics search strategies should be built from generalized effective Lagrangians, rather than scans of higher-scale parameters of a full theory or pure model-independent
searches.  I'll present recent CDF results on a search for a 4th generation down-type quark (b'), including the strongest direct limits on this particle. I will also show work on search for a Z',
using a newly developed statistical approach. Finally, I'll present prospects for supersymmetric searches using generalized effective Lagrangians."