The Scintillator-Layered Imaging Microscope for Environmental Research (SLIMER) is a tool under development by researchers at Los Alamos National Lab and Tennessee Tech University to measure uptake of specific isotopes in biological systems. SLIMER incorporates a microcolumnar scintillator in a fluorescent microscope in order to study microbial systems exposed to 32P, 33P, or 14C. For this purpose, SLIMER needs to have excellent position resolution and light collection. If SLIMER can pinpoint the area of the slide where the radioactive decay event occurs, this would indicate the area in which a microbe has absorbed the isotope. The microbes in that area of the slide can then be identified using DNA analysis. In order to study and refine the capabilities of SLIMER, a simulation was developed with C++ and GEANT4. The GEANT4 packages for radiation and scintillation were used to provide a realistic model of radioactive decay and scintillator activity. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, the physical setup of the experiment was tested and refined, and data was collected. Data analysis is still ongoing. Further objectives include improvement of the position resolution; identification of a minimum detectable activity; and developing a calibration consistent for all sources. Possible applications of SLIMER will also be discussed.

We present a lattice QCD calculation of the strange quark contribution to the nucleon’s magnetic moment and charge radius using 2+1 flavor dynamical fermion. We have performed a model-independent extraction of the strange quark magnetic moment and charge radius and present the most precise and accurate estimates to date. We also find that the total contribution to the nucleon charge radius from the nucleon sea u, d, s-quarks is negative and this hints a shift of the proton charge radius towards the value obtained from the muonic hydrogen Lamb shift experiment.

In the Standard Model (SM) baryon number – lepton number (B-L) is perfectly conserved. Therefore, the observation of the transition from a neutron to an antineutron reveals the existence of physics beyond the SM. I will start with the Lorentz invariant B-L violating operators of lowest mass dimension and discuss the “wrong” CPT problem associated with their transformation properties under CPT. Then I will argue how the special transformation properties of Majorana fermion under the discrete symmetries CPT, CP, and C can help solve this problem and lead to the discovery of discrete-symmetry phase constraints on the fermion fields in B-L violating theories. I will discuss how the incorporation of these phase constraints leads to new ways of discovering neutron-antineutron transitions.

There are two problems that are hidden behind the moniker "proton radius puzzle". One is the discrepancy between the spectroscopic measurements of the proton radius in ordinary and muonic hydrogen. Another is the discrepancy between the proton radius extracted from the electron-proton scattering and from the muonic hydrogen spectroscopy. I will remind how the proton radius is measured in all three types of experiments. The current status of the proton radius puzzle and the progress on the road to its resolution will be discussed.

GRIFFIN [1], the Gamma-Ray Infrastructure For Fundamental Investigations of Nuclei is the new decay spectroscopy array located at TRIUMF, Canada’s National Laboratory for Nuclear and Particle Physics, in Vancouver, Canada. GRIFFIN consists of 16 large-volume hyper-pure germanium (HPGe) clover detectors assisted by a custom-built digital data acquisition system. A suite of ancillary detector systems are coupled to GRIFFIN for comprehensive decay spectroscopy experiments with radioactive beams delivered by the TRIUMF-ISAC facility.
The early-implementation experiments with radioactive beams were performed with the GRIFFIN array, coupled to SCEPTAR [2], an array of plastic scintillators for beta-particle tagging, and PACES [2], an array of five lithium-drifted silicon detectors for high-resolution internal conversion-electron spectroscopy. Eight lanthanum bromide scintillators for fast gamma-ray timing measurements [2], and a neutron detector array for the detection of beta-delayed neutron-emitting nuclei called DESCANT, [3] are also available for future experiments.
Results obtained with the GRIFFIN spectrometer near and far from stability using beta decay of beams of 115g,mAg [4], 128−130Cd [5], 46,47K [6,7], 32Na [8], and 132In [9] will be presented along with a discussion of future opportunities, including the addition of the Compton and background suppression shields.
The GRIFFIN spectrometer is funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, TRIUMF, and the University of Guelph with matching contributions from the British Columbia Knowledge and Development Fund and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Industry. TRIUMF receives federal funding via a contribution agreement through the National Research Council of Canada. This research is supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

References
[1] C.E. Svensson and A.B. Garnsworthy, Hyperfine Interactions 225, 127 (2014).
[2] A.B. Garnsworthy and P.E. Garrett, Hyperfine Interactions 225, 121 (2014).
[3] P.E. Garrett, Hyperfine Interactions 225, 137 (2014).
[4] R. Dunlop et al., to be published.
[5] R. Dunlop et al., Phys. Rev. C (2016).
[6] J.L. Pore et al., to be published.
[7] J. Smith et al., to be published.
[8] F. Sarazin et al., to be published.
[9] K. Whitmore et al., to be published.

Despite the tremendous success of the Standard Model of particle physics, there remain several fundamental aspects of the Universe that are still not understood. One such is the violation of the symmetry of simultaneous charge exchange and parity inversion (CP), which allowed the early Universe to become more abundant in matter than in antimatter. For some 65 years the electric dipole moment of the neutron (nEDM) has been the observable of choice to gain insight into this problem.

At the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland our collaboration is currently running the world's most sensitive nEDM measurement. Our goal is to explore the area below the present limit of the nEDM, which stands at 3e-26 ecm 90% C.L. [J.M. Pendlebury et al. PRD 92, 092003 (2015)]. In my talk I will explain how we measure the nEDM using Ramsey interferometry of neutrons. Operating at neV energies, we employ an exciting combination of the gravitational, strong and electromagnetic interactions to guide, store and manipulate the spins of polarised ultra-cold neutrons. The measurement requires magnetic field stabilities on a picotesla level, reaching of which is only possible thanks to an active magnetic field compensation system. Ongoing R&D effort for a next generation compensation system is going to be presented. I will also discuss how our experiment is used to explore alternative extensions to the Standard Model, such as for example an ultra-low-mass axion dark-matter search.

The science of stellar nucleosynthesis aims at understanding how the elements in the universe are formed in stars. On a microscopic scale, the formation of elements is dictated by the properties of atomic nuclei and their interactions. Of special importance for r-process nucleosynthesis is a fundamental understanding of shell evolution towards neutron-rich nuclei. I will briefly discuss the underlying physics of nuclear shell evolution and will report on our experiments at the University of Kentucky, CERN and RIKEN (Japan). I will also discuss our current efforts to develop a state-of-the-art silicon tracker device for the future ARIEL facility at TRIUMF (Canada) and will mention medical applications for improved dose monitoring in cancer therapy with heavy ions.

Precision electric dipole moment (EDM) measurements of fundamental particles are extremely sensitive to Beyond Standard Model sources of charge/parity violation required for generation of the observed matter/anti-matter asymmetry in the universe. I will give a brief overview of the relevant theory and the general experimental principles of such searches. I will then focus on an experiment to measure the neutron's electric dipole moment at Oak Ridge National Lab, and especially the optimization of the collection efficiency of the scintillation light used to measure the neutron's precession frequency.

The decay mode B-> K* ll is one of the most promising modes to probe physics beyond the standard model (SM),  since the angular distribution of the decay products enable measurement of several constraining observables. LHCb has recently measured these observables using $3\fb^{-1}$ of data as a binned function of $q^2$, the dilepton invariant mass squared. I will discuss that LHCb data implies a signal for new physics and provides unambiguous evidence for right-handed currents, which are absent in the SM. These conclusions are derived in the maximum $q^2$ limit and are free from hadronic corrections. Our approach differs from other approaches that probe new physics at low $q^2$ as it does not require estimates of hadronic parameters but relies instead on heavy quark symmetries that are reliable at the maximum $q^2$ kinematic endpoint.