Description:

Calibration of second-order electron recoil effects in liquid xenon

Dylan Temples

Abstract: Current generation liquid noble dark matter detectors use injected beta decay sources to calibrate for all electron recoils (ERs). There is evidence that leads us to believe this calibration may neglect contributions to the ER spectrum due to the main background in these types of detectors: neutrino-electron scattering. In certain neutrino-electron scatters, there are second-order effects which change the event topology such that these ERs look more nuclear recoil (NR)-like than ERs produced by beta decays. Without calibrating for these events, current and next generation experiments may falsely interpret them as a WIMP signal. The XELDA experiment has been developed in order to measure the significance of these effects and what impact they would have on a dark matter search. In this talk I will discuss a model for these secondary effects and motivate why they may look more like NRs, and describe the XELDA experiment.

Nuclear magnetic resonance as a probe of the mixed state of cuprate

Ingrid Stolt

Abstract: Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a useful tool for probing local magnetic and electronic environments of high-temperature (high-Tc) superconductors. In particular, NMR is useful for studying the so called “mixed state” in which magnetic fields can penetrate the superconductor by forming quantized magnetic “vortices”. I will focus on the application of NMR in the study of high-Tc cuprate superconductor Hg-1201 by discussing how measurements of nuclear relaxation timescales and NMR spectral lineshapes can reveal valuable information about the mixed state as well as characterizing the system.