Past Workshops & Meetings

Proton decay experiments strongly constrain models in which baryon number is violated. Typical models must be associated to very high-energy scales to be viable, making them hard to probe with independent methods. An interesting class of models, which has gained significant attention in recent years, still violate baryon number but only by two units such that the proton remains stable. The last years have seen interesting developments in the associated particle, hadronic, and nuclear theory and the connection to outstanding cosmological problems such as the matter-antimatter asymmetry. In addition, future measurements made by the ESS NNBar Collaboration, DUNE, PNPI Gatchina, and Hyper-Kamiokande in the realm of dinucleon decay and neutron-antineutron transformations have real discovery potential.

In this focused workshop, we wish to bring together practitioners of the various communities, both theoretical and experimental, to discuss what are the challenges and prospects for the detection of baryon number violation in the near future, and what would be the implication of signals or lack thereof.

Co-Organizers:
Joshua Barrow (Fermilab)
Leah Broussard (Oak Ridge National Lab)
Jordy de Vries (UMass Amherst)
Michael Wagman (MIT)

Tests of the unitarity constraint on the first row of the CKM matrix continue to provide powerful probe of physics beyond the Standard Model. The effectiveness of this probe relies on having sufficiently precise measurements and theoretical, Standard Model computations. This workshop will address the following questions: What is the status of the first-row CKM unitarity constraint? What is the status of radiative and nuclear/hadronic structure-dependent corrections that underly that test? A particular focus will be on arriving at a clear picture of the present level of theoretical uncertainty in extracting the value of V_ud from experiment and on strategies to reduce it. An additional emphasis will fall on obtaining a consensus for present determination of V_us. We will gather the world experts for providing a complete and in-depth review of all crucial theoretical and experimental ingredients.

Co-organizers:
Mikhail Gorshteyn (Mainz University)
John Hardy (Texas A&M University)
Michael Ramsey-Musolf (UMass Amherst & Tsung-Dao Lee Institute, Shanghai Jiao-Tong University)
Chien Yeah Seng (Bonn University)