Issue 04, January 15 2018

Greetings, Happy New Year! We hope you had a great holiday break and the year is going well so far. 2019 promises to be a productive year for the McDonald Institute as we move forward on our mission to help build Canada's Astroparticle Physics community.

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5 th  NEWS-G collaboration meeting in Kingston

One and a half years after the last gathering in Kingston, Queen’s University was chosen again to host the 5 th  edition of the NEWS-G collaboration meeting.   More than 30 collaborators from all over the world (Canada, USA, France, Greece, UK) traveled to Kingston, where the group led by Prof. Gilles Gerbier is based.

The collaboration has seen many changes in 2018, and this event gave new members the opportunity to meet the other teams and to visit the NEWS-G facilities at Queen’s university.    During the 2-day meeting, participants presented on a wide variety of topics and participated in discussions on many aspects of the project, especially the upcoming experiment at SNOLAB.

Dr. Miriam Diamond at UofT We’d like to congratulate Dr. Miriam Diamond on her appointment as Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. Diamond’s experience in both high energy particle physics and her specialization in low-mass dark matter searches make her an excellent faculty addition and a valuable part of the Canadian Astroparticle Physics community. As an undergraduate, Diamond worked with the SNO Collaboration on the discovery of neutrino oscillation which earned the team the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

During her PhD at UofT, Diamond worked with the ATLAS Collaboration which she recently used data from for an analysis of the decay of neutral, weakly interacting, long-lived particles. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.07370.pdf

Deadline approaching for proposals to The 2020 and beyond Women in Physics Canada Conferences The 2019 Conference will be held this summer at McGill University in Montreal. More details will be announced soon, so keep an eye on the website here. The call for proposals for the 2020 conferences are open until January 25th 2019. You may submit proposals as groups or individuals and the Steering Committee is happy to discuss any aspect of the conference, including possible sources of support, with interested parties.

Upcoming events

Thanks to the great success of our first event, we will be holding the second IGnite: Research Stories to Inspire Generations on January 31st. Queen’s University faculty Laura Murray and John Smol will tell you about the unanswered questions that set them on their lifelong quest of research. A handful of keen students will also give short and sweet snippets of their developing interests and there will be science demos such as the NEWS-G dark matter detector and the Queen's Mars Rover on display before and after the talks.

For details and preregistration information, please visit: https://mcdonaldinstitute.ca/events/ignite/

The next Ewan Lecture will be held on the evening of February 12th and will feature Dr. Francis Halzen, Hilldale and Gregory Breit Professor at the University Wisconsin-Madison & Principal Investigator of IceCube. For details and preregistration information, please visit: https://mcdonaldinstitute.ca/events/ewan-lecture/

The McDonald Institute Seminars The speakers for this semester's seminars have been confirmed and are listed on the MI website: https://mcdonaldinstitute.ca/events/type/mcdonald-institute-seminar-series/ Our first speaker of 2019 is Evan McDonough whose talk " New Gravitational Probes of Dark Matter " will take place on Thursday, January 27th from 2:30-3:30PM in Stirling 501 .

Donate your physics books!

We have received several requests for a resource library to be available to the astroparticle student community as many books are not readily available through the University and can be quite expensive for individual students to buy. If you have books that you'd like to donate, please contact Diana in Stirling 304B . You'll be acknowledged as the donor inside the books. The library will be located in 412D.

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