Author: Luiz de Viveiros

Last week, Luiz de Viveiros and Carmen Carmona organized an outreach activity celebrating the “International Dark Matter Day”. Together with postdocs and students from the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos (IGC), they hosted an information booth in the physics department lobby. It included a live virtual tour of the LZ dark matter experiment 1 mile underground, led by a former Penn State grad student Gavin Cox, now a staff scientist at the Sanford Lab in South Dakota (you can see him in the monitor in the photo below!). The event was a success, with many students stopping by to ask about dark matter, particle physics, and cosmology! Thanks everyone who participated for your support!

Dark Matter Day is celebrated on the day of Halloween 🎃, because, you know, dark matter is mysterious and spooky 😉! So to mark this day, the Dark Matter and Neutrinos Group at Penn State will be hosting a Dark Matter Day event at the Osmond Lobby on October 31st, 2024! We will have an information booth at the lobby from 10am to 2pm, to explore the science of dark matter and the experiments looking for it! Speakers include Profs. Carmen Carmona, Luiz de Viveiros, and postdocs and students working on Dark Matter experiments! We will also host a live, virtual tour of the LUX-ZEPLIN Dark Matter Experiment, located 1 mile underground in an abandoned gold mine! The virtual tour is at 12pm.

Today, our experiment LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) released new results from our ongoing search for dark matter, now with 280 days’ worth of data.  No dark matter yet, but the results establish LZ again as the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector, and puts the best-ever limits on particles called WIMPs, a leading candidate for what makes up the universe’s invisible mass.

Penn State Press Release: https://science.psu.edu/news/LZ-experiment-8-2024

Science News: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dark-matter-wimps-lz

Dark Matter Day is an international event dedicated to outreach activities focused on the research and exploration of dark matter and its many enigmas. And of course it’s celebrated on Halloween 🎃, because it’s some spooky stuff 😉!

The Dark Matter and Neutrinos group, together with colleagues from the IGC and physics department, hosted an information booth at the HUB (the main student center in the university), to talk to people about Dark Matter, Cosmology, and Physics in general! We had a lot of students stopping to ask about it, and some lively discussions! In the spirit of Halloween, we also gave out some dark chocolate!

Below are some pictures. The booth was hosted by: Luiz de Viveiros, Carmen Carmona, Donghui Jeong (Faculty); Sarah Schon (Postdoc); Wei Zha, Katie Wild, Joshua Black (Grad Students); Amber Krape, Gus Eberlein (Undergraduate Students).

Congratulations Dr. Ziegler!

Andrew has successfully defended his PhD thesis, titled “Development of Scalable Approaches to Neutrino Mass Measurement with the Project 8 Experiment”! It was a very well written dissertation and masterfully delivered presentation! The only bad thing is that he will be leaving us after this! We will miss you Andrew! Congrats!

Our paper with the Project 8 “Phase-II” results has been published! This is the first measurement of the tritium beta decay and consequently the first limit on the neutrino mass using the new technique we developed, Cyclotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy (CRES)! Although we were not able to measure the mass of the neutrino, due to limited stats, this result proves that the technique works and is opens a promising path to make a definitive measurement of the neutrino mass!

There were a number of press releases and article following the paper publication, including a video we produced summarizing how the experiment works – see links below:

https://www.sciencealert.com/wild-new-technique-could-finally-measure-the-elusive-neutrino

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.102502

Congratulations Dr. Dan Kodroff!!!

Dan has successfully defended his PhD thesis, titled “Background Modeling and First Searches for Low Energy Signals in the LUX-ZEPLIN Dark Matter Experiment”! It was an impressive presentation, the culmination of years of excellent work and dedication!

The Penn State group was at the April APS Meeting 2023 in Minneapolis, MN, representing both the LZ dark matter and Project 8 neutrino mass experiments!

LZ had a huge showing, with 9 talks, plus a number of collaborators presenting talks on adjacent topics. Our grad student Dan Kodroff was at the meeting giving the talk detailing the backgrounds present in the LZ detector, with an emphasis on the background model used in LZ’s first results and how these backgrounds were constrained in situ.

We also saw our former undergraduate student, Jacob McLaughlin, now a grad student at Northwestern and still working on LZ, presenting with a great talk on the use of Rn chain pair tagging to help mitigate Pb backgrounds!

Luiz de Viveiros presented a talk giving an overview of the Project 8 experimental program, and highlighting the latest results including our first tritium endpoint measurement and neutrino mass limit.

We have written a companion paper to the First Tritium Results Paper (posted earlier in this blog), which was submitted to PRL. This is a longer paper, being submitted to PRC, and it gives a detailed description of the experiment, focusing on the systematic effects and analysis techniques used in the PRL:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12055

 

The whole LZ group from Penn State went to the LZ Collaboration Meeting at the University of Maryland (UMD) on January 5-7! It has been a long time since we met in person, due to the pandemic, and it was good seeing everyone! We met to discuss the latest results, and make plans for the year ahead. It was a good time, celebrating the incredible year we have had, with lots of good science done in 2022, and lots more to come!