April news from Canada's Astroparticle Physics Hub

Issue 07, April 18 2018

Greetings,

This month's newsletter is short and sweet. We hope you enjoy it and we've included another astroparticle emoticon at the end as a thank you for your continued interest.

412 Day!

On April 12th, the McDonald Institute celebrated the hard work of our highly qualified personnel (HQP) with an appreciation event in our Queen's University student office.

We enjoyed great food and conversations with our local MI community and look forward to more events like this in the near future.

Thank you to all those who were able to join us and to Art McDonald for taking time to support the event and share in the celebration.

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Congratulations to our Lindau Annual Nobel Laureates Meeting student delegates!

Every year, a group of Nobel Laureates gathers in Lindau, Germany to meet with young scientists and researchers from all over the world. The 69 ^th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting is dedicated to physics and will take place on 30 June–5 July 2019. 40 Nobel Laureates including Arthur McDonald and Donna Strickland will meet 580 young scientists from 88 countries for inspiring dialogue.

This year Dr. Arthur McDonald was invited to nominate 6 outstanding students to attend the meeting. The McDonald Institute facilitated the nomination process and will contribute to the travel expenses of the selected students.

The delegates (from left to right): Tetiana Kozynets (University of Alberta), Damian Goeldi

(Carleton University), Vanessa Graber (McGill University), Tarnem Afify (York University), Helena Koniar (McMaster University), and Connor Stone (Queen's University).

The inaugural Girls Innovation Research Leadership Science summer camp is open for registration (see link below)!

The one-week summer camp is being operated at Queen's University campus as a new program developed and managed by local graduate students Liz Fletcher, Benjamin Tam and undergraduate student Sam Connolly in the Department of Physics, Engineering Physics & Astronomy. It is co-sponsored by the McDonald Institute and SNOLAB. Once the camp has been completed, the curriculum content will be available to institutional members of the McDonald Institute upon request. Contact [email protected] to request access to curriculum content.

Please visit the camp website for details and registration information.

Astroparticle Bites launching soon!

We would like to announce that Astroparticle Bites is finally starting later this week. Currently we will have a recent astroparticle physics paper discussed weekly at a level appropriate for physics undergrads. These will be given by a group of current or recent graduate students. Please head to mcdonaldinstitute.ca/apbites for more information, and email Mark Richardson, our Education and Outreach Officer at [email protected] if you are interested in becoming a contributor or would like to sign up to receive the weekly Astroparticle Bites post.

SiPM Workshop

TRIUMF is offering a special workshop on Silicon Photomultiplier (SiPM) technologies in June. The Friday afternoon workshop is to be held at the end of the Canadian Association of Physicists Congress, which is being held at Simon Fraser University June 3-7 this year.

The "SPHINX" workshop (Sensing the PHotonic Imprints of Neutrinos and X-particles) will be dedicated to the development of single photon detection solutions for applications in Astro-particle physics experiments and beyond.

The list of expected application & technology topics will include:

• Light detection in liquid scintillator (applications)

• Light detection in water Cerenkov detectors (applications)

• Light detection in bubble chamber experiments (applications)

• Light detection in liquid Argon (applications)

• Light detection in liquid Xenon (applications)

• 3D integrated digital SiPMs (technology)

• Vacuum Ultra-violet Silicon photo-multiplier and optics (technology)

• Hybrid photo-detectors (technology)

Dr. Fabrice Retière, Senior Research Scientist at TRIUMF, is leading the organization of SPHINX. He welcomes the community's suggestions for additional topics pertaining to photon detection. The workshop will take place on Friday, June 7 in the afternoon (most likely at Simon Fraser University). Individuals interested in giving a talk at the workshop, or seeking additional details, should contact Dr. Retiere at [email protected]

Thank You!

The dark matter emoticon from the last newsletter was quite popular, so in honour of the EHT image of the M87 black hole, here's an "astonished black hole" emoticon. Enjoy!