This special Physics department PhD colloquium is scheduled for Thursday (4/21/2016) afternoon at 12:30 pm in KIRC KEN 2035. Coffee and cookies will be served at 12:00 NOON on KIRC 3rd floor. Anyone is welcome.

Intersections of Astrophysics, Cosmology and Particle Physics
Luis da Silva UWM Physics PhD Candidate

With the success of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, a new era of discovery has just begun. The SU(3)C x SU(2)L x U(1)Y Standard Model (SM) of electroweak and strong interactions has once again endured intensive scrutiny. Most spectacularly, the recent discovery of a particle which seems to be the SM Higgs has possibly plugged the final remaining experimental hole in the SM, cementing the theory further. Adding more to the story, the IceCube Collaboration recently reported the discovery of extraterrestrial neutrinos, heralding a new era in astroparticle physics. The collaboration was able to isolate 36 events in 3 years of data, with energies between 30 TeV ≤ Ev ≤ 2 PeV. These events are consistent with an isotropic distribution in the sky, and a purely atmospheric explanation of the data can be excluded at 5.7σ.

However, problems still exist. Cosmological observations concerning Dark Matter and the expansion rate of the Universe have shown us our picture of the basic constituents of the Universe and the interactions among them are not fully understood. In addition, the determination of the origin of high energy neutrinos has proven to be a quite formidable question, with many possible candidates for sources. In this work, we take a global approach to understanding the laboratory, astrophysical and cosmological observations, and study the connections and possible paths towards the final solution of these problems.