Speaker
Description
Two critical questions in particle physics remain unanswered--what is the particle nature of dark matter, and why is there no antimatter in the universe? Searches for neutron oscillations are an essential component of the worldwide program to understand baryon number violation and what comprises dark matter, but are underexplored experimentally. If dark matter is made up of a rich hidden sector such as "mirror matter," a neutral particle such as the neutron might transform into its sterile twin. The HIBEAM (High Intensity Baryon Extraction and Measurement) program at the European Spallation Source will search for neutrons disappearing into mirror neutrons and the possibility that they regenerate back into either neutrons or antineutrons. This program will inform a future high sensitivity search for free neutrons transforming directly into antineutrons as part of the NNBAR experiment, which can improve sensitivity by three orders of magnitude over the previous direct search.
