Department of Physics, Syracuse University
Graduate student Abhilash Yallappa Dombara has received an award from the Universities Research Association Visiting Scholars Program. He’ll be relocating to Fermilab soon to focus on the NOvA test beam program, including detector commissioning, operations, and data analysis to better understand systematic uncertainties in NOvA’s long-baseline neutrino oscillation program.
Congratulations, Abhilash!
Syracuse University has now officially joined the NOvA experiment. Prof. Whittington has been a member of NOvA since 2013 when he joined through Indiana University as a postdoctoral researcher. This weekend, Whittington successfully petitioned the collaboration to add Syracuse University to its ranks. He and graduate student Abhilash Yallappa Dombara are the first NOvA collaborators from the neutrino group. They will initially focus on understanding the neutrino and antineutrino composition of NOvA’s antineutrino-mode data, crucial to improving the precision of neutrino oscillation physics measurements.
The third LIght Detection in Noble Elements (LIDINE) conference, held at SLAC Sept. 22-24, brought together specialists in noble element-based detectors from across the dark matter and neutrino communities. Experts shared new developments in harnessing the scintillation properties of argon, xenon, and other noble elements to study weakly-interacting particles. Prof. Whittington co-chaired the conference and presented new findings on the scintillation properties of liquid argon-xenon mixtures that could lead to enhanced particle detection capabilities in the next generation of liquid argon neutrino experiments.