Astroparticle physics experiments searching for rare events, such as neutrinoless double beta decay and dark matter particles interactions, have to be shielded from background radiation that would interact and hide the physics of interest, and have to exhibit a radioactive background as low as possible. Therefore, underground site are preferred. Being protected from cosmic rays, […]

Gravitational wave detectors require constant innovation in detector technology to meet the growing needs of the astrophysics community. With improved sensitivity, we can move beyond the measurements in the local universe and perform precision tests of cosmology. I will discuss our efforts to reduce the amount of low frequency noise within the LIGO detectors, which has […]

The “cosmic web” of dark matter halos forms via the collapse of post-inflation density fluctuations. While linear perturbation theory describes this process well at large scales and low densities, it fails at small scales and high densities. I explore two facets of nonlinear structure formation that constrain cosmology: at mildly nonlinear scales, measuring the baryon […]

New discoveries in quantum information science and in dark matter detection rely on finding more sensitive detectors than those in state-of-the-art experiments. Traditional detector technologies, based on nuclear and electron scattering, have a lower bound on their sensitivity depending on the target's mass and bandgap. We investigate two classes of new low-threshold detector target materials […]

Beyond the Standard Model of particle physics there exists a form of matter, which seems to be dark in all interaction channels but in its gravitational influence. The nature of this major constituent of the universe is still not understood. The assumption that it is made up of particles which can possibly leave a trace […]

The non-zero mass of neutrinos suppresses the growth of cosmic structure on small scales. Since the level of suppression depends on the masses of the three active neutrino species, the evolution of large-scale structure is a promising tool to constrain the total mass of neutrinos and possibly shed light on the mass hierarchy. I will […]

Liquid xenon two-phase time projection chamber (TPC) is one of the most promising technologies for WIMP dark matter direct detection. By using this technology, the LUX, XENON1T, and PANDAX-II collaborations established the most stringent limits on WIMP-nucleus cross section above 10 GeV. For WIMP searches, the expected signal is composed of nuclear recoils (NR), while […]

The introduction of liquid-xenon (LXe) to the field of dark-matter direct detection caused a paradigm shift in this search. Primarily focused on the search for the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle, LXe detectors have improved our sensitivity to these dark-matter candidates by a factor of 10,000 since their introduction roughly ten years ago, compared to the […]

Many Grand Unified Theories predict processes that would allow baryons to decay to leptons, violating baryon number conservation. The observation of baryon number violation in nucleon decay would be a revelation as well as being pivotal in understanding the apparent asymmetry between baryons and anti-baryons in the universe. This is manifest in some theories primarily […]

Neutrinoless double beta decay is the matter-creating process that is most accessible with the current technology. Its discovery would demonstrate the non-conservation of lepton number and that neutrinos have a Majorana mass component, and indicate a possible solution for the baryon asymmetry of the universe. In this seminar, I will review the current status of […]

The Waggle Platform is a research project at Argonne National Laboratory to design, develop, and deploy a novel wireless sensor platform with advanced edge computing capabilities to enable a new breed of sensor-driven environmental science and smart city research. The software and hardware designs from the Waggle project are used by the NSF funded Array […]

This is the first of a two-part series on the axion and the current experimental campaign to find it. This first seminar will focus on the history and motivation of the axion, rooted in the Strong-CP problem, i.e. the absence of the neutron electric dipole moment, some phenomenology, and an overview of experimental avenues to […]

Continuing on the topic of axion searches from last week, this seminar will highlight one experiment, HAYSTAC, which looks for an axion-induced power excess spectrally coincident with the resonance of a microwave cavity immersed in a strong magnetic field. This is the first such experiment to incorporate a dilution refrigerator and Josephson parametric amplifier and […]

This seminar gives a brief historical introduction to solar neutrino detection, and motivates the use of solar neutrinos as a tool to probe physics beyond the standard model. An analysis of SNO data constraining the lifetime of neutrino decay is presented, along with solar neutrino results from SNO+ water phase. Additionally, R&D for simultaneous detection […]