Colloquium

What's so cool about Ultra-Cold Neutrons?

Professor Bradley Filippone

California Institute of Technology

Wednesday, September 6, 2006   4:00 p.m.  NSH 118

(Refreshments at 3:30 p.m. NSH 284)

 

Ultra-Cold Neutrons (UCN) are defined as neutrons with small enough kinetic energy that they can be trapped in material bottles or by modest magnetic fields. With kinetic energies below 300 nano eV, UCN are ideal for studying the fundamental properties of the neutron. Precision studies of neutron decay can test the limits of the Standard Electroweak Model. In addition, highly sensitive searches for an Electric Dipole Moment of the neutron probe possible new sources of CP violation (Charge-conjugation and Parity) which could be responsible for the dominance of matter over antimatter observed in the Universe. I will discuss new techniques that have recently been developed for producing higher densities of UCN and the corresponding dramatic improvements possible in these experiments.