Dark Matter

The faculty members below are working on Dark Matter in KICP. Please see their webpages for more information.

Juan Collar

Juan's main interest is in the development of innovative methods for the detection for hypothetical astroparticles (WIMPs, axions, magnetic monopoles, any yet-to-be-discovered component of cosmic rays that might constitute a fraction of the 'dark matter').

Luca Grandi

Luca’s main interest is in the development of noble-liquid technology for rare event searches. He focused his research on argon and xenon two-phase Time Projection Chambers for Dark Matter searches. He recently joint the XENON-1T project after having been strongly involved from 2008 to 2015 into the design, operation and analysis of DarkSide-50.

Paolo Privitera

The nature of Dark Matter(DM) - five times more common in the universe than ordinary matter according to astrophysical and cosmological evidence - is still eluding our understanding. A compelling explanation invokes yet unknown particles as a major component of DM. Privitera scrutinizes this hypothesis by searching for DM-induced nuclear and electron recoils in mm-thick Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs.) He is the PI of the DAMIC-M (Dark Matter In CCDs at Modane) experiment, a kg-size detector based on the CCD technology to be installed at the Laboratoire Souterrain de Modane in France, protected from cosmic rays by the rock overburden of the Alps. With its unprecedented low energy threshold (few eV), DAMIC-M will take a leap forward of several orders of magnitude in the exploration of the dark matter particle hypothesis, in particular of candidates pertaining to the so-called "hidden sector."