Penn State’s LZ group at the April APS Meeting!

The LZ dark matter experiment is having a strong participation in the APS April Meeting, with 15 talks! Penn State’s Prof. Carmen Carmona-Benitez kicked off the dark matter direct detection session with the main talk for LZ, reporting on its current status and announcing that LZ’s first science results are expected in 2022! As chair of the LZ Speaker’s Board, she was also in charge of coordinating and reviewing all the talks presented at the APS!

Our grad student Dan Kodroff followed directly with a presentation on the detector backgrounds, the main driver for dark matter sensitivity!

Tomorrow we will have grad student Andrew Ziegler giving a presentation on Project 8!

Carmen Carmona at the APS April Meeting 2022
Carmen Carmona at the APS April Meeting 2022
Dan Kodroff at the APS April Meeting 2022
Dan Kodroff at the APS April Meeting 2022

Next Generation Liquid Xenon Observatory for dark matter and neutrinos

The Penn State group joins forces with the rest of the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) collaboration and XENON/DARWIN to work together on the next generation (G3) detector for dark matter and neutrinos!

The whitepaper is now on arXiv: arxiv:2203.02309

Ethan wins 3rd place in poster competition

Our undergraduate student, Ethan Ritchey, has won 3rd place in the Eberly College of Science undergraduate poster exhibition here at Penn State! He presented a poster on his research on modeling neutron signals in a novel detector design that we are developing, the Snowball Chamber, which uses supercooled water to detect particle interactions.

Ethan Ritchey presents his poster at the ECoS Undergraduate Poster Exhibition, 2021.

Poster: “Development of the Snowball Chamber into a Novel Particle Detector.”

https://www.psu.edu/news/academics/story/eberly-colleges-undergraduate-research-exhibition-success/

https://altoona.psu.edu/gallery/41776/2021/10/28/eberlys-fall-2021-undergraduate-research-poster-exhibition

Carmen receives the Sloan Fellowship 2021 Award

Carmen Carmona PhotoCarmen has been awarded the 2021 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in recognition of her research accomplishments! Congratulations!

About the Sloan Fellowship, from the Penn State News website: ‘Awarded annually since 1955, the fellowships honor extraordinary researchers whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of scientific leaders. “A Sloan Research Fellow is a rising star, plain and simple” said Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “To receive a fellowship is to be told by the scientific community that your achievements as a young scholar are already driving the research frontier.” […] The fellowships are awarded in close coordination with the scientific community. Candidates must be nominated by their fellow scientists and winners are selected by independent panels of senior scholars on the basis of a candidate’s research accomplishments, creativity, and potential. A Sloan Research Fellowship is one of the most prestigious awards available to young researchers.

https://news.psu.edu/story/647780/2021/02/16/academics/three-eberly-college-science-awarded-2021-sloan-research

2021 Sloan Research Fellows Logo

The LZ Outer Detector

SURF temporarily closed

The Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), the lab where LZ is being constructed, is effectively closed due to the COVID19 pandemic.