Dark Matter and Neutrino Mass Group
Dark Matter Direct Detection, Neutrino Mass Measurements, and Particle Astrophysics at Penn State University
We will be hosting the Fall 2017 Collaboration Meeting for the Project 8 Experiment here at Penn State! The meeting will take place on October 30th – November 1st, followed by an analysis workshop on November 2nd-3rd.
More information at:
Prof. Luiz de Viveiros is out on Fermilab for the LZ Technical Collaboration Meeting! The meeting is focused on technical reviews of the various subsystems for the LZ Dark Matter experiment, to make sure everything is on track for an early 2020 start date!
Three undergraduate students from right here at Penn State have joined our group for the Summer 2017 REU (Corey, Jacob and Nick). With the 2 postdocs that have also recently joined us (Tim and Emily), we have a full house in our lab at Davey 012!
Dr. Emily Grace has joined the Dark Matter and Neutrino Mass group at Penn State on July 17th, 2017. Dr. Grace will be working on the LUX and LZ Dark Matter experiments. An specialist on detector hardware design and development, and experience on liquid noble detectors, she will working on the design of test systems and the commissioning of LZ, a next generation detector that will push the search for weakly-interacting dark matter particles to unprecedented sensitivity. Welcome to to Penn State, Emily!
Prof. Carmen Carmona hosted the LUX Analysis Workshop from June 5 to 9 at Penn State, a week-long event in which >30 physicists from several institutions in the LUX Dark Matter Experiment met at Penn State (with a few more calling in) to discuss the status, plans and techniques for the analysis of LUX data. The workshop focused on training new students and engaging current collaboration members to push forward the analysis of LUX data following the end of the experiment in late 2016. We hope the event was fruitful and fun, and that all visitors enjoyed their stay at Penn State!
Dr. Timothy Wendler has joined the Dark Matter and Neutrino Mass group at Penn State on June 1st, 2017. Dr. Wendler will be working on the Project 8 experiment, which has developed the technique of Cyclotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy to measure the endpoint energy of Tritium beta decays, and use it to determine the mass of the neutrino. With a background in designing and operating of RF hardware for multi-band RADAR systems at NAVAIR, Dr. Wendler will be focusing on the design of the electronics and signal reconstruction techniques for the next phase of the experiments, which seeks to build a large version of the Project 8 prototype and demonstrate the scalability of the technique. Welcome to Project 8 and to Penn State, Tim!
Carmen Carmona and Luiz de Viveiros present invited talks at the BLV2017 conference at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, OH.
C. Carmona – ‘Direct Dark Matter Searches’ (Plenary)
Luiz de Viveiros – ‘The LZ Dark Matter Experiment’
For full talk list and slides: http://artsci.case.edu/blv2017/scientific-program/
The Project 8 collaboration gathers at MIT to discuss previous results and future plans, in preparation for the start of our first Tritium run, expected to happen by this Summer. This will be the first use in Tritium of the Cyclotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy (CRES) technique pioneered by Project 8, and is expected to deliver groundbreaking results for future measurements of the neutrino mass!
Prof. Carmen Carmona presents an update on the LZ Dark Matter sensitivity projections at the LZ Collaboration Meeting at SLAC (Menlo Park, CA).
Our press release got published on the Penn State News!
http://news.psu.edu/story/452721/2017/02/24/next-generation-dark-matter-detector-race-finish-line
This is a note about LZ being given CD3 approval by the Department of Energy (DOE). This is of special importance because it indicates approval of the final design and formally launches construction of the experiment!