Speaker: Dr. Jeffrey Lazar
Title: Tau Neutrino Astronomy in the Peruvian Andes with TAMBO
Abstract: The detection of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos by IceCube has opened a new window on our Universe. While IceCube has measured the flux of these neutrinos at energies up to several PeV, much remains to be discovered regarding their origin and nature. Currently, the discovery of point sources of neutrinos is hindered by atmospheric neutrino backgrounds; likewise, astrophysical neutrino flavor ratio measurements are limited by the difficulty of discriminating between electron and tau neutrinos.
TAMBO is a next-generation neutrino telescope specifically designed to detect tau neutrinos in the 100 TeV to 1 EeV energy range. This tau neutrino specificity enables the low-background identification of astrophysical neutrino sources, as well as tests of the flavor ratio of astrophysical neutrinos. Additionally, the high-energy reach of TAMBO will allow us to probe models of cosmogenic neutrino production. TAMBO will comprise an array of water Cherenkov and plastic scintillator detectors deployed on the face of the Colca Canyon in the Peruvian Andes, with its unique geometry facilitating the high-purity measurement of astrophysical tau neutrinos. In this talk, I will present the particle physics and astrophysics that TAMBO will study in the context of next-generation neutrino observatories. I will also provide an update on the status of detector construction.
Speaker: Akash Kumar Saha
Title: Shedding Infrared Light on QCD Axion and ALP Dark Matter with JWST
Abstract: JWST observations have already revolutionized Infrared astronomy and astrophysics. Besides probing standard astrophysics, JWST observations can also be used to hunt for dark matter (DM). If DM is made up of eV-scale QCD axions or Axion-like particles (ALPs), then they can decay to two photons and the resulting line feature can contribute to the spectroscopic observations made by JWST. Using the existing JWST NIRSpec IFU observations, we are able to probe axions in mass ranges $\sim$ 0.47 and 2.55 eV. With this, we constrain well-motivated QCD axion and ALP-DM models. Future observations of DM-rich targets with a better understanding of the background will become powerful tools in discovering QCD axion and ALP DM.