![]() Taylor, who worked on building and testing the PMT arrays, said, “LZ has the potential to be the most sensitive WIMP search experiment in the world. Testing of the PMTs, which the Hamamatsu Corporation manufactures in Japan, was performed at Brown.Īfter testing the PMTs for more than two years, the team assembled them into the final arrays used in LZ. The Brown team worked with Berkeley Lab and Imperial College London researchers to design, test, and assemble all of the array’s components. (Credit: The schematic is the LZ collaboration, and the image on the right is LZ/SLAC) (Right) Illustration of LZ operation - particles interact in liquid xenon, releasing a flash of light and charge that are collected by photomultiplier tube arrays at top and bottom. The arrays serve as the “eyes” of the experiment and will do the actual detection of dark matter by looking for the faint flashes of light that would be produced if a dark matter particle collides with a xenon atom inside one of LZ’s tanks. The Brown research group’s work building the detector’s PMT arrays was central to the experiment’s successful launch. (Credit: Matthew Kapust, Sanford Underground Research Facility.) deuterium-deuterium (DD) fusion neutron generator. The neutrons are produced using an Adelphi Technologies, Inc. The conduit on the right, showing a hint of blue, is a DD neutron conduit, which the group uses to send neutrons into the detector to calibrate the expected dark matter signal. ![]() Looking up into the LZ Outer Detector, used to veto radioactivity that can mimic a dark matter signal. The titanium tanks reside in a larger detector system to catch particles that might mimic a dark matter signal. The heart of the LZ dark matter detector is comprised of two nested titanium tanks filled with nearly ten tonnes of very pure liquid xenon and viewed by two arrays of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) able to detect faint sources of light. Dario Garcia, Jake Lyle and Devon Seymour made huge contributions as technicians. Three Brown post-doctoral research associates–Junhui Liao, Monica Pangilinan, and Xin Xiang–worked on the experiment. Undergraduates who contributed included Sissi Chen, Eamon Hartigan-O’Connor, David Heffren, Yizhong (Richard) Hu, Charles Kocher, Jacob Migneault, Napali Raymundo, Grant Rutherford, Angela White and Anna Zuckerman. This included the building, testing and integration of over 14,000 components for the two massive photodetector arrays for this unprecedented experiment.”īrown doctoral and master’s students on the team included Amjad Alqahtani, Jihyeun (Jeanne) Bang, Samuel Chan, Chen Ding, Dongqing Huang, Renée Kirk, Runxuan Liu, Jan Makkinje, David Malling, Casey Rhyne, Nat Swanson, William Taylor, Austin Vaitkus and James Verbus. It’s amazing how much work we did in the labs and cleanrooms in the basement of Barus and Holley. Brown University Hazard Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for the Fundamental Physics of the Universe Richard Gaitskell, who leads the Brown group, said, “This has been a monumental effort and many Brown doctoral, master’s and undergraduate students, as well as post-docs and technicians, contributed. Deep below the Black Hills of South Dakota in the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), an innovative and uniquely sensitive dark matter detector-the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, led by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab)-has passed a check-out phase of startup operations and delivered first results.īrown University’s LZ research group made many major contributions to the project. ![]() The long search for dark matter, estimated to comprise 85 percent of all mass in the universe, took a major step forward now that the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, an ambitious international collaboration, is fully operational. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |