VIRTUAL

 

Thursday, October 21st    2021

3:45 – 4:45 pm (MT)

WEBEX


Speaker:  Matthew Szydagis

 

 Associate Professor Physics

University at Albany SUNY

 

“A Discovery of a New Application for Supercooled Water”

 

 

Abstract: 

Direct evidence for neutrons causing nucleation of supercooled water has been found. Highly purified water (20 nm filtration) was cooled to well below freezing (as low as -20 °C) with a radioactive calibration source of neutrons / gamma-rays either present or removed during each of many control cooling runs for the same volume of water. When it is primarily neutrons irradiating the sample bulk, the non-equilibrium freezing point (also known as the “supercooling point”) is, on average, +0.7 °C warmer than the control equivalent, with a statistical significance of greater than 5 sigma, with systematic uncertainty included. This effect is not observed with water in the presence of gamma-rays instead of neutrons. While these neutrons should have theoretically had sufficient energy to mount the energy barrier, corroborating our results, their raising of supercooling temperature has never been reported experimentally to the best of our knowledge. The potential to use deeply supercooled water samples as metastable detectors for radiation and perhaps dark matter or neutrino physics presents now a new avenue for exploration, in the broader context of existing experiments in those fields.

 

Bio: 

Dr. Matthew Szydagis received his B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago, then worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Davis. He is now an Associate Professor at the University at Albany SUNY studying experimental particle astrophysics, in particular direct detection of dark matter, as well as general detector development for rare event searches. He was inspired by science fiction as a child to become a scientist, and has always been interested in many different scientific disciplines broadly. He is a member of the LUX and LZ dark matter experiments and the spokesperson/leader of the related NEST and Snowball collaborations.