Kate Scholberg - US grants

This CAREER proposal is a request for support for the Principal Investigator's continuing involvement in experimental neutrino physics and describes her plan to play a role in the intermediate detector of the new J-PARCnu project. Over the next several years, our knowledge of two-flavor oscillation parameter space will be refined by several experiments, including Super-K and K2K. Assuming that a "standard" 3-flavor picture holds, the next steps will be to fully explore the masses and mixings in a 3-flavor context by determining the value of theta13, determining the mass hierarchy, and, ultimately, searching for CP violation in the lepton sector. Knowledge of these parameters is essential for a full understanding of the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe. The next promising step is to search for theta13 via an electron-neutrino appearance in a muon-neutrino beam. Because theta13, and hence the amplitude for electron-neutrino appearance, is known to be small, this is a challenging task. The J-PARCnu project, which involves a new high-intensity muon-neutrino beam originating at the J-PARC facility and sent to a refurbished Super-K far detector, will have a sensitivity to theta13 approximately 20 times better than current limits. "Phase II" of this program aims to determine the mass hierarchy, and search for leptonic CP violation.

The proposal describes education and outreach activities related to neutrino physics. Specifically, it proposes to develop and make available a neutrino physics workshop module for high school teachers.

The 2006 Hadron Collider Physics Symposium will be hosted by Duke University from May 22-27, 2006. The symposium will be a major forum for the presentation of Tevatron Collider measurements, and has recently been merged with the LHC Symposium. At the Duke meeting, Tevatron results based upon about 1 inverse femtobarn of data will be presented, along with recent measurements made at RHIC. The status and plans for all LHC experiments will also be presented, showing the expected physics reach beyond the CDF and D0 experiments. Included in the conference will be theoretical reviews relevant to the full range of hadron collider research. Broader impacts of this conference include education of young physicists, and outreach to the community. A public lecture is planned for one of the evenings of the conference.

When a massive star reaches the end of its life, the core of the star collapses, producing a supernova. While visually spectacular, less than 1% of the energy in the supernova is released as visible light or as kinetic energy in the surrounding environment. Most of the energy from the supernova is released in neutrinos, which are small particles that only interact weakly with matter. The neutrino emission from a supernova precedes the emission of visible light by a few minutes up to many hours. Detecting the first neutrinos from a supernova therefore provides an early alert to trigger further observations. The SuperNova Early Warning System (SNEWS) is a network of neutrino detectors around the world designed to provide automated early alerts for supernovae in our galaxy. While rare, a galactic supernova would provide a unique opportunity to study the physics of core-collapse supernova, as well as the properties of neutrinos. The early alerts from SNEWS will enable observations of the earliest phases of the supernova for physicists and astronomers around the world. The SNEWS project works to engage amateur astronomers, who may play an important role in optical observations of supernova, and to involve them in the science of supernova.

SNEWS involves neutrino detectors around the world: Super-K, Large Volume Detector, IceCube, Borexino, KAMLand, and Daya Bay. If any of the participating experiments finds a burst of events, it sends a datagram to the central SNEWS computer located at Brookhaven National Laboratory, with a backup located in Bologna. If a coincidence is found within 10 seconds, a supernova alert will be sent out. SNEWS has been operational since 1998, and has been running in a fully-automated mode since 2005 with near-100% up-time. This award will provide funds to maintain the SNEWS system, support undergraduate researchers participating in the project, and expand connections to the astronomical community.

This award provides funding for the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics, a two-day conference for undergraduate women in physics taking place on January 16-17, 2010 simultaneously at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), the Ohio State University (OSU), the North Carolina Research Triangle (NCRT), and Yale University. The conference has two overarching goals. One goal is to give young women the confidence, motivation, and resources to apply to graduate school and successfully complete a Ph.D. in physics or a related discipline. The other goal is to make undergraduate women in physics more aware of the wide range of career opportunities available to them. The conferences will be modeled on previous conferences at the University of Illinois, Urbana (UIUC), University of Michigan, the University of Southern California (USC), and Yale over the past four years. This conference is intended to reach as diverse a group of women in physics as possible, and the organizers are committed to providing access to the conference at minimal cost to the participants to assure that a lack of funds does not discourage participation. This award is supported by the Division of Physics, the Division of Materials Research, and the Division of Astronomical Sciences.

This award will enable collaborative work by Duke University and the University of Minnesota Duluth's neutrino research groups on the Helium and Lead Observatory (HALO). This is a new experiment designed to detect neutrinos originating in a core-collapse supernova within our own galaxy. The deaths of massive stars which cause these cataclysmic events occur every few decades somewhere in the MilkyWay and emit 99% of their energy in the form of a short burst of neutrinos. Existing detectors are primarily sensitive to electron antineutrinos. Use of lead for its target nuclei allows HALO to be sensitive to electron neutrinos, as well as to all flavor components of the burst flux via neutral current interactions. The effort for this funding cycle will center on upgrading HALO with redundant, fast-failover data acquisition systems. This award will provide modest hardware and personnel contributions to this effort.

Broader impacts of this award include the excellent experimental training for students and postdoctoral researchers. They have been very successful in involving students and postdocs in the past. This project offers a range of experiences, from simulation through detector construction, with operations and data analysis to commence soon. HALO will also be a contributor to SNEWS (SuperNova Early Warning System), which has an intrinsic outreach component.

This award to the American Physical Society supports the continued growth and improvement of the Conferences for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP), held annually since 2006. The conferences have two overarching goals: 1) to give undergraduate women the resources, motivation, and confidence to increase their retention in physics and related disciplines; and 2) to increase awareness by undergraduate women in physics of the wide range of career opportunities available to them. Regional conferences are held simultaneously to maximize student attendance by minimizing travel, to increase the excitement of the participants in a joint national venture, and to allow the interactive simulcast of a keynote address.

The project aims to evaluate networking effectiveness, self-efficacy beliefs, physics identity, and outcome expectations of the participants. Through this research and the project evaluation, there is potential to gain new knowledge about issues facing undergraduate women in physics, as well as measures of the impact that conference activities such as these have on their attendees. The project will advance our understanding of factors that alter the trajectories of female students -- a population that remains underrepresented in physics -- as they pursue undergraduate degrees in physics.

This project is supported jointly by two divisions of NSF's Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate: the Division of Physics and the Division of Materials Research.

When a massive star reaches the end of its life, the core of the star collapses, producing a supernova. While visually spectacular, less than 1% of the energy in the supernova is released as visible light or as kinetic energy in the surrounding environment. Most of the energy from the supernova is carried away by neutrinos produced during the collapse of the core. In contrast to photons, neutrinos interact only very weakly with matter. They can therefore stream out of the supernova explosion without delay and thus arrive at Earth minutes to hours before the optical explosion may be visible. Detecting the first neutrinos from a supernova therefore provides an early alert to trigger further observations. The SuperNova Early Warning System (SNEWS) is a network of neutrino detectors around the world designed to provide automated early alerts for supernovae in our galaxy. While rare, a galactic supernova would provide a unique opportunity to study the physics of core-collapse supernova, as well as the properties of neutrinos. Alerts from SNEWS will enable observations of the earliest phases of the supernova for physicists and astronomers around the world. The SNEWS project works to engage amateur astronomers by involving them in this science, as they play an important role in optical observations of supernova.

This award supports a collaborative group from several institutions to upgrade the existing SNEWS real-time alert system to include new detectors, and to prepare to better exploit the collective capabilities of these detectors. The team will model neutrino light curves and use those models to evaluate the expected signals in all available neutrino detectors. They will develop optimal methods for prompt determination of the supernova direction using both neutrino interaction anisotropies, as well as inter-experiment triangulation algorithms which will be based on relative observed timing of the neutrino signals. Prompt directional information will sharply improve the likelihood to detect the early onset of the light curve in multiple channels. This is crucial not only for the understanding of supernova explosions, but also for many other areas of physics including astrophysics, nuclear physics, and particle physics. Finally they will develop pre-supernova alerts based on the observation of the uptick in neutrino production that accompanies the final burning stages of a doomed star. This proposal also supports involvement of the amateur astronomy community in this exciting area of research, the creation of a topical planetarium show, as well as a smartphone app for use in education and alert dissemination.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

The data revolution is dramatically accelerating the acquisition rate of new information, creating a vast amount of data. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a solution for rapid processing of complex datasets. New hardware such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) allow AI algorithms to be greatly accelerated. To take full advantage of fast AI, the Institute of Accelerated AI Algorithms for Data-Driven Discovery (A3D3) targets fundamental problems in three fields of science: high energy physics, multi-messenger astrophysics, and systems neuroscience. A3D3 works closely within these domains to develop customized AI solutions to process large datasets in real-time, significantly enhancing their discovery potential. The ultimate goal of A3D3 is to construct the institutional knowledge essential for real-time applications of AI in any scientific field. Through dedicated outreach efforts, A3D3 will empower scientists with new tools to deal with the data deluge. Students mentored through A3D3 research will interact closely with industry partners, creating new career opportunities and strengthening synergies between academia and industry.

The approach of A3D3 is to tightly couple AI algorithm innovations, heterogeneous computing platforms, and science-driven application development informed through close collaboration with domain scientists within physics, astronomy, and neuroscience. The common theme across domains is the development of AI strategies accelerated by emerging processor technology, employing hardware-AI co-design as a transformative solution to a wide range of scientific challenges. Hardware architectures such as GPUs and FPGAs have emerged as promising technologies to address many of the challenges in data-intensive science because they provide highly-performant, parallelizable, and configurable data processing pipeline capabilities. When combined with AI algorithms, these architectures significantly accelerate scientific workflows compared to CPU-only computing platforms. Building on the existing Fast Machine Learning community, A3D3 cultivates an ecosystem where scientists across domains collaborate to meet critical challenges, forming a central hub of excellence for innovation in accelerated AI for science. The work is extended to the public at large through a diverse set of educational training programs and by mentoring next-generation scientists.

This project is part of the National Science Foundation's Big Idea activities in Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) and Windows on the Universe - The Era of Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (WoU-MMA). This award by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by the Divisions of Astronomical Sciences and of Physics within the NSF Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

The end of the life of a massive star may result in a core collapse that produces a supernova. The energy released in these extreme astrophysical events is primarily carried away in the form of neutrinos produced during the collapse of the core. Since neutrinos interact only weakly with matter, compared to photons, they escape the supernova explosion without delay, arriving at Earth minutes to hours ahead of the optical component of the event. Neutrinos may therefore be harnessed as an early notification of the supernova that may trigger extensive follow-up observations of these relatively rare events within the galactic neighborhood. This award supports a collaborative group of scientists at several institutions to continue upgrading the SuperNovae Early Warning System (SNEWS), a state-of-the-art network between neutrino and dark matter detectors around the globe designed to provide automated prompt alerts of impending supernovae in our galaxy to the astronomical community. The team, consisting of experimentalists and phenomenologists with expertise in supernova physics, will develop optimizations to the SNEWS 2.0 system to enhance the detection capabilities. The awarded activities include the development of a follow-up strategy involving the amateur astronomer community, as well as a topical multi-lingual planetarium show developed for world-wide distribution.<br/><br/>The onset of the next Galactic core-collapse supernova will be a rare opportunity to advance knowledge in both multi-messenger astrophysics and fundamental physics. The SNEWS program provides the means to observe a galactic supernova in neutrinos and, due to the early alarm, the onset of the supernova light curve. Benchmarking of the system components via a series of realtime readiness tests will improve the network’s robustness, performance and capabilities. Building on the existing network architecture for multi-messenger astronomy, the updated system will provide the ability to identify bursts of pre-supernova and supernova neutrinos, and therefore enhance the ability to localize the neutrino arrival directions for electromagnetic follow-up. This project advances the goals of the NSF Windows on the Universe Big Idea.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.