Supervisors: Dr. Anna Holin (RAL/PPD) + Prof. Jeff Hartnell (Sussex University)
Informal additional RAL/PPD adviser: Prof. Claire Shepherd-Themistocleous
This project will encompass searching for evidence of Dark Matter using extra-terrestrial neutrinos and the development of a novel new detector technology for neutrino experiments.
Explaining the Dark Matter content of the universe is one of the major challenges in Particle Physics today. Neutrino detectors provide the exciting possibility of detecting neutrinos from the Sun and the Galactic centre that have arisen from Dark Matter annihilations. The student will explore the potential of the next generation of neutrino detectors, Hyper-Kamiokande and DUNE, to detect neutrinos from Dark Matter annihilation.
The past twenty years have seen major advances in neutrino and dark matter detector technology. The student will work on one of the most exciting new developments in neutrino detector technology which turns the accepted paradigm of requiring transparent detector media on its head. The new LiquidO detector technology uses an opaque scintillating medium and wavelength-shifting optical fibres to reconstruct the tell tail evidence of charge particles, resulting from neutrino interactions, producing scintillation light in the medium. This easily scalable type of detector has major advantages over more traditional and cumbersome physical segmentation of regions of detector. There are many applications in particle physics and beyond. In particular, LiquidO technology could be deployed as a near detector at the Hyper-Kamiokande experiment. Further information can be found here: https://youtu.be/Ccc3ecIoowk.
Applications are invited from talented, creative, and motivated students. We anticipate that the successful applicant will be able to gain both hardware/instrumentation experience as well as data analysis experience.
For more details, contact Anna Holin (anna.holin@stfc.ac.uk) or Jeff Hartnell (j.j.hartnell@sussex.ac.uk).
