Colloquium: Brad Cownden and Fady Shaker
Fri. Nov. 13 12:30 PM
- Fri. Nov. 13 01:20 PM
Location: 1L11
Brad Cownden
PhD Student, University of WinnipegSupervisor: Dr. Andrew FreyTITLE: To Infinity and Back: Modelling Black Hole Formation in Anti-de Sitter Space
ABSTRACT: The formation of a black hole by the collapse of matter and/or radiation is a process that involves numerical solutions to Einstein’s equations. In this talk we will discuss modelling the formation of a black hole on a special background called Anti-de Sitter (AdS) space. AdS space is special because a light pulse can travel to infinity and back in a finite time. This means that, instead of escaping to infinity, outgoing radiation can bounce off infinity and come back to form a black hole at later times. In this talk, we will review recent results for massless fields (e.g. radiation) and investigate whether or not formation of a black hole is inevitable in AdS. We will then discuss current work with massive fields (e.g. dust) and how/if they form black holes.
Fady Shaker
PhD Student, University of WinnipegSupervisor: Dr. Blair JamiesonTITLE: Are There Any Sterile Neutrino States?
ABSTRACT: Observation of neutrino oscillations led to the discoveries that neutrinos have masses and that lepton flavour is not conserved. Experimentally, the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) experiment found some clues of rapid oscillation from νμ → νe corresponding to a mass splitting of around 1 eV2 . The existence of this mass splitting, requires at least one new neutrino flavour. This neutrino does not couple to the W and Z bosons in the standard model. This result has also been confirmed later by The MiniBooNE experiment in 2012.
Sterile neutrinos, if they exist, may be heavy right handed neutrinos. The proposed heavy right handed neutrino has not been observed yet and does not couple to standard model particles via the weak interaction.
In this talk, I will summarise the theoretical and experimental motivations for the existence of sterile neutrinos. I will outline two related sterile neutrino experiments, LSND and MiniBooNE. I will also show the latest results from the T2K experiment, which I am a member of.