News from Canada's Astroparticle Physics Hub

Issue 03, December 11 2018

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Welcome to the third edition of the McDonald Institute newsletter. Thank you for taking the time to subscribe, we appreciate your support.

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New publication from the NEWS-G team

Daniel Durnford and Quentin Arnaud reviewing some data in the NEWS-G experiment room in Stirling Hall at Queen's University.

Properly modeling the energy response of dark matter experiments is essential to understanding a particle detector's sensitivity to this elusive constituent of the Universe. This is all the more important for experiments searching for low-mass dark matter, such as NEWS-G, and more challenging because of the extremely small energies being measured. In this paper by Daniel Durnford et al ., they propose using the COM-Poisson probability distribution to, for the first time, directly model the energy response of ionization-measuring detectors at these extremely small energies.

First publication from Brendon Matusch : Developing a Bubble Chamber Particle Discriminator Using Semi-Supervised Learning.

One method to detect dark matter uses bubble chambers, large containers of superheated fluid where interactions with weakly interacting particles deposit enough energy to instigate local boiling of the fluid, creating bubbles. However, discriminating between dark matter and other energetic particles is both challenging and critical for the success of the experiment. In his first academic publication , 14 year old Brendon Matusch and collaborators discuss applying artificial intelligence to the task.

Using neural networks, they first trained their system on controlled data. From there, the network looks at real data and replicates the existing acoustic parameter discriminator with a mean accuracy of 97%. This is a crucial step in training computers to automatically identify candidate dark matter interactions and best utilize human resources.

New Federal Research Funding Program

The federal government is replacing the Networks of Centres of Excellence with a new five-year $275-million program targeted toward high-risk, disruptive research and innovation outcomes.

The New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) was announced by Science Minister Kirsty Ducan Dec. 6. The new funding program was recommended by the Canada Research Coordinating Committee that was formed in 2017 to develop greater harmonization, integration and coordination of research-programs and policies between the Tri-Council research funding agencies (NSERC, SSHRC, CIHR) and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).

The NFRF's first tranche of funding will support approximately 75 two-year "Exploration" grants of $250,000 each. Notices of Intent to apply are due Jan. 11, 2019 . The Exploration grant is being managed by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to support early career principal investigators using unconventional interdisciplinary research approaches or ideas for high-risk and high-reward investigations not otherwise supportable from normal Tri-Council or CFI grants. The awards are not restricted to any particular disciplinary focus.

Larger funding opportunities are expected to be announced under the NFRF's "Transformation" and "International" competitions.

The Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE) were launched in 1988 to fund large collaborations of Canadian researchers with renewable 5-7 year grants, typically ranging from $15 million to more than $30 million. Networks funded under the 30-year-old NCE program included AllerGen, ArcticNet, AUTO 21, Canadian Frailty Network, Canadian Institute for Photonic Innovations, Canadian Institute for Telecommunications Research, Intelligent Sensing for Innovative Structures, Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems, MEOPAR, Micronet, Canadian Stroke Network, Stem Cell Network and the Ultra Deep Mining Network.

Upcoming events

Thanks to the great success of our first IGnite: Inspiring Generations through Research event, we will be holding another edition in the new year 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.

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/

Astroparticlebites coming soon!

Many of you may be familiar with the popular science writing websites Astrobites and the high energy particle site Particlebites . These sites offer a high visibility outlet for graduate students to share their work and develop their writing. Dr. Mark Richardson (MI Education & Outreach Officer) will be launching a new site in the coming months to provide a similar opportunity for graduate students in the lower energy, astroparticle physics field. Students interested in participating should get in touch with Mark asap, as he will be holding the initial meeting this afternoon, Tuesday, December 11th at 3:30PM in Stirling 201. Please contact Mark for more details.

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.