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November 8, 2022 past

GAPP: Development and Construction of the High-Energy Light Isotope Experiment

339 Davey and Zoom: https://psu.zoom.us/s/93737760341

GAPP: Development and Construction of the High-Energy Light Isotope Experiment

Lucas Beaufore, University of Chicago
The High Energy Light Isotope eXperiment (HELIX) is a balloon-borne magnet spectrometer which seeks to address critical questions in cosmic ray physics by measuring the chemical and isotopic abundances of key light isotopes in the cosmic ray flux. One such measurement, that of the ratio of Be-10/Be-9, will provide strong discrimination between cosmic ray propagation models. In its first of two planned flights, HELIX will measure these abundances up to the ~3 GeV/n region. The instrument consists of a 1T superconducting magnet, a gas particle tracking system placed in the bore of the magnet, an aerogel RICH with a focal plane made of Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs), a scintillating fiber hodoscope, and a scintillating paddle time-of-flight system. This talk will cover the design, construction, and calibration of HELIX's novel RICH as well as a brief overview of HELIX's payload.

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2022-11-08 13:30 Lucas Beaufore Development and Construction of the High-Energy Light Isotope Experiment
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.