I’m interested in underground rare event searches most notably direct detection of dark matter in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) as well as developing and prototyping novel detector designs for next generation searches. I currently am a member of SuperCDMS, a collaboration attempting to observe as-yet undetected WIMP interactions in Ge and Si crystals. SuperCDMS attempts to detect WIMP interactions by observing the phonon (sound) and ionization signals resulting when a WIMP scatters off a nucleus in a detector. A WIMP scatter is expected to deposit energy similar to that of a single x-ray. The primary challenge is WIMP detection is the "needle in a haystack" challenge of distinguishing a WIMP interaction from the millions of times larger background.
