Katherine Pachal

Fri. Jan. 21 12:30 PM - Fri. Jan. 21 01:20 PM
Contact: Andrea Wiebe
Location: via Zoom

Research Scientist at TRIUMF, Vancouver, BC

Research scientist focusing on experiments with beyond-Standard-Model physics implications. Currently working on the DarkLight experiment.

Dark sectors at accelerators across the mass scale: ATLAS, DarkLight, and the hunt for a new boson

We have a great mathematical model for how the known elementary particles interact, but there are phenomena such as dark matter that it doesn't explain. New particles light enough to be created at accelerators could resolve many of these issues, but could exist anywhere across a very wide range of masses and behaviours. Accordingly, physicists are using many different experiments to search for them, each optimised for a different target. This colloquium will discuss the motivation for new bosons interacting with the dark sector and introduce two very different experiments searching for them: ATLAS, at the 13 TeV LHC, and DarkLight, at the 30 MeV ARIEL accelerator at TRIUMF.

BIO: Kate is an experimental particle physicist whose research focuses on searches for new particles. She was a part of the ATLAS collaboration for more than 10 years but has recently turned her focus to developing the proposed DarkLight experiment.  She got her BSc from the University of Victoria and her PhD from the University of Oxford. She worked as a postdoc first at Simon Fraser University and then at Duke University before beginning her current position as a research scientist at TRIUMF.

 

Missed the talk? Watch it here: https://uwcloud.uwinnipeg.ca/s/PZRttAeLyMFCGH3