Sussex Universe

6 November: Catching ghosts: First neutrino observation and searches for Dark Matter

There are a billion ghost-like particles passing through an area the size of your thumbnail every second. These are known as neutrinos and play a crucial role in our understanding of the Universe, from how the Sun shines, to exploding supernovae. But there are also many things we don’t know about neutrinos! FASER is a new particle detector adding to the long history of neutrino physics by being the first experiment to observe directly neutrinos produced in a collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). FASER stands for “ForwArd Search ExpeRiment” and one of its other aims is to search exotic long-lived new particles that are candidates to explain the existence of Dark Matter. If they exist, these exotic particles would be produced in LHC collisions detected by FASER. FASER is able to look for a type of these Dark Matter particles that no experiment until now has had sensitivity to. I will present the first results from FASER, including the first observation of collider neutrinos and our first search for Dark Matter.

20 November: Is waste heat a wasted opportunity?

You may not see it, but all around us heat is transferred to the local surroundings and effectively wasted. With the extremely pressing need to meet net-zero emissions, there is a precedent to recover this wasted energy and do something useful with it. This talk will explore the scale of the problem and introduce technologies we have at our disposal to use this wasted heat to provide heating, cooling or electricity. A conservative estimate is that 150 TWh of electricity could be generated per year from industrial waste heat in Europe. This is equivalent to the electricity consumption of 20 million homes, or half the annual electricity consumption of the UK.

4 December: Hand to Mouth: The language Puzzle 

Language is what makes us uniquely human. Yet, how language evolved and over time remains a mystery. We cannot ask our ancient ancestors because they are all extinct, and we cannot find all of the answers in the archaeological remains of our ancestors because cognition does not fossilise. However, we can turn to our great ape cousins as a window into our pre-linguistic past to consider what ancient behaviours may have played pivotal roles in the emergence of human language. I’ll take you on a journey from hand to mouth, exploring one of the leading theories behind the emergence of modern human language.