The Wright Lab community is invited to a weekly meeting on Mondays at 9:30 a.m. on Zoom to hear about and discuss what is going on at the lab.
Direct searches for dark matter which targeted SUSY-motivated areas of parameter space employed well-studied nucleon interactions at keV to MeV energy scales to predict typical DM-nucleon interaction distributions. Much lighter DM, probed by a new generation of experiments sensitive to eV-scale energy deposits, however, rely instead on condensed matter effects to extract larger recoil energies from the DM than would be suggested by the simple elastic kinematics of heavier DM.
The HUNTER experiment (Heavy Unseen Neutrinos from Total Energy-momentum Reconstruction) is a search for sterile neutrinos with masses in the 20-300 keV range. The experiment uses a combination of AMO, nuclear and particle physics techniques to do kinematically complete missing mass reconstruction of neutrinos from 131-Cs electron capture decays. A magneto-optically trap (MOT) of 131-Cs atoms provides a pure sample of ~10^8 radioactive atoms suspended in EUHV with no inert material present.
Please join us for a virtual coffee chat with Merideth Frey (BA, Wellesley College. PhD, Yale University). Merideth Frey is currently heading the physics department at Sarah Lawrence College, where she is designing lab-based courses to add to the curriculum, as well as applying physics education research-based methodologies to the core physics courses. Professor Frey previously taught courses at Wesleyan University and Princeton University, including helping develop investigative science learning environment physics labs.
