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Jordan Goodman, professor and chair of physics at the University of Maryland, will talk about “Neutrinos, Dark Matter and the Cosmological Constant — the Dark Side of the Universe” noon today in Gagnon Lecture Hall, Hugel Science Center.
Pizza and soft drinks will be provided free of charge. The lecture is one of several sponsored this year by the Physics Club.
Goodman is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a 1999-2000 University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar Teacher, and a winner of the USM Regents award for excellence in teaching. Andrew Doughterty, associate professor of physics, will talk about “The Early Stages of Dendritic Crystal Growth” at noon Friday, March 1.
Goodman’s area of research, particle astrophysics, studies cosmic radiation to better understand the properties of elementary particles and the processes in space that produce these particles. This field blends elements of high-energy physics and astrophysics.
Starting with his Ph.D. work, which showed evidence for an abundance of heavy elements such as iron in high-energy cosmic rays, Goodman has worked to understand the nature of cosmic rays that hit the earth. Recently, his work has concentrated on two experimental efforts– Milagro and Super-Kamiokande.
Milagro is located in the mountains of New Mexico and is designed to study high-energy gamma rays from space. Goodman is the scientific co-spokesman for Milagro, the first gamma ray detector capable of continuously monitoring the entire overhead sky at energies below 1 TeV. The energy threshold of Milagro is an order of magnitude lower than any other all-sky instrument operating in the VHE regime, making it the ideal instrument to study the transient and variable sources of VHE gamma rays in the universe.
Super-Kamiokande is a 50,000-ton ring-imaging water Cerenkov detector located at a depth of 2,700 meters water equivalent in the Kamioka Mozumi mine in Japan. Super-K was designed to search for proton decay, and to study atmospheric and solar neutrinos. Super-K has found evidence of the transformation of muon type neutrinos to tau type neutrinos. This is strong evidence that neutrinos have a small, but finite mass.
Goodman also is a member of the SuperNova Acceleration Probe Satellite experimental team. Details on SNAP can be found at http://snap.lbl.gov/.