Focuses and Research

My research is dedicated to detecting and studying neutrinos, light neutral Standard Model particles with some very remarkable properties. Neutrinos are produced in massive quantities by burning and exploding stars, and on Earth by nuclear reactors and particle accelerators, among other things. They travel the universe at nearly the speed of light, changing flavor and passing directly through most of the matter they encounter. By detecting neutrinos and measuring their properties, physicists can learn a great deal about the Standard Model as well as the objects and processes that created them.

Some of my group’s recent work has focused on measurement of reactor antineutrinos created at a research reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a commercial reactor complex in Shenzhen, China. The former effort, called PROSPECT, has set world-leading limits on the existence of strange neutrino neutrino types called ‘sterile neutrinos,’ while the latter effort, called the Daya Bay experiment, measured the neutrino flavor oscillation parameter θ13 to world-leading precision. In addition to making further flavor oscillation measurements, we also measure the energy spectrum and flux of the antineutrinos produced by these reactors, which provides new insights into what takes place in the heart of an operational nuclear reactor.

My group’s other effort is dedicated toward extending the capabilities of liquid argon time projection chambers (LArTPCs), which are large (from tons to tens of kilotons) detectors capable of snapping millimeter-precision images of charged particles. You can think of them as next-generation bubble chambers, or really, really large digital cameras. Experiments like MicroBooNE and SBND at Fermilab or the next-generation DUNE experiment in South Dakota will use LArTPCs to take pictures of particles produced by GeV-scale beam neutrino interactions. My group works to define how well these GeV-scale detectors can also measurements at much lower (100s of keV to MeV) energies.

Postdocs

  • Ohana Benevides Rodrigues
  • Will Foreman
  • Jacob McLaughlin

Graduate students

  • Manoa Andriamirado
  • Diego Andrade Aldana
  • Miguel Hernandez Morquecho
  • Anosh Irani
  • Franz Machado

Undergrads

  • Liani Silva
  • Noah Beaman
  • Nathan Rybicki
  • Efithia Giannoudakos