Dr Ashlea Kemp is an experimental particle physicist specialising in rare-event, low-background direct dark matter searches using noble liquid detectors. Presently, she works on two dark matter experiments, DarkSide-20k and QUEST-DMC. DarkSide-20k is the flagship global liquid argon (LAr) experiment, currently under construction at the LNGS laboratory in Gran Sasso, Italy. The 50-tonne detector will reach more than an order of magnitude increase in the sensitivity over current searches for dark matter particles with masses at the TeV scale, with great potential to search for lower mass dark matter particles also. QUEST-DMC is one of seven flagship experiments funded by the Quantum Technologies for Fundamental Physics (QTFP) programme and is a unique interdisciplinary collaboration of particle and ultra-low temperature physicists. With the use of a superfluid Helium-3 target, QUEST-DMC has unprecedented sensitivity to sub-GeV mass dark matter candidates.
Dr Kemp’s expertise lies in data acquisition (DAQ) systems, Silicon Photomultiplier (SiPM) photosensors, and in statistical inference techniques for dark matter searches. During her PhD she was awarded a Leverhulme Study Abroad Studentship, where she held several significant collaboration roles including the on-call DAQ expert, and co-convener for the Signal Extraction working group for the DEAP-3600 LAr dark matter experiment. As a Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen’s University, Canada, working under Prof Art McDonald (Nobel Laureate, 2015), she played a leading role in co-ordinating the very first SiPM characterisation campaign for DarkSide-20k. In 2024, Dr Kemp was awarded a prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, to build her own research team within PPD to search for dark matter using DarkSide-20k and QUEST-DMC.
