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Colloquium

Title:  From yeV to TeV: Searching for the Neutron Electric Dipole Moment

Speaker: Douglas H. Beck, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Location: Room 111, Physics Building

Time: 15:00-16:00, Wed, Mar 25, 2015

 
Abstract:

Measurements of the neutron electric dipole moment (EDM) over the past sixty years have pushed its upper limit to ever lower levels.  During that time, the absence of an observable EDM has limited numerous theories of new subatomic physics.  At this point, the expectation is that charge conjugation and parity (CP) violation beyond the standard model, perhaps manifest in a neutron EDM, is required to explain the baryon asymmetry of the universe (much more matter than anti-matter).  Particular beyond-the-standard-model theories, such as supersymmetry, tend to predict as much CP violation as current EDM limits allow.  A new round of experiments is planned to provide neutron EDM sensitivities more than an order of magnitude below the current limit.  I will describe one such measurement and a couple of the interesting experimental challenges.

Biography:
Professor Beck received his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Saskatchewan in 1979, and his Ph.D. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986. After working as a senior research fellow at the California Institute of Technology for two years, he joined the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois as an assistant professor in 1989. He was promoted to associate professor in 1994 and to full professor in 1999.

Professor Beck is the creator, spokesman, principal driving force, and intellectual leader of the G0 experiment at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. This collaboration of more than 80 senior physicists from 18 institutions is designed to elucidate a detailed spatial distribution of charge and current densities for strange quarks. The Illinois group, under Professor Beck's leadership, is responsible for the main instrumentation for the experiment, a superconducting toroidal spectrometer. The $2M magnet for the spectrometer was designed and tested at Illinois before being successfully installed at JLab. The eight internal lead collimators for the magnet were also assembled and tested at Illinois.