Wright Lab hosts ALPHA Collaboration Meeting
Image courtesy of Reina Maruyama.
From September 8-9, thirty-four researchers from institutions around the world came together for a meeting of the Axion Longitudinal Plasma Haloscope (ALPHA) Collaboration at Yale’s Wright Lab.
The ALPHA experiment, currently under construction at Wright Lab, will extend the search for a dark matter candidate—a very low-mass particle called the axion—to a higher mass range than has been searched for previously.
The collaboration meeting included discussion about the design and construction of ALPHA, as well as its scientific goals and physics reach. The group also toured Wright Lab, including the experimental setup in one of Wright Lab’s high bay spaces.
Twenty-two participants attended the meeting in-person; the rest attended remotely via a Zoom connection. The participants were from the following ALPHA collaboration institutions: Cambridge University; Stockholm University; Arizona State University; ITMO University; Johns Hopkins University; MIT; University of California, Berkeley; University of Iceland; Wellesley College; Yale; Fermilab; and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Yale is the lead institution for ALPHA and hosts the experiment. Yale contributions include the magnet, cryogenics, quantum-enabled detector readout, and systems engineering and integration. Wright Lab professor Reina Maruyama is the deputy spokesperson for ALPHA.
Yale involvement in ALPHA includes Keith Baker, D. Allan Bromley Professor of Physics; Sean Barrett, professor of physics; Charles Brown, assistant professor of physics; Karsten Heeger, Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and director of Wright Lab; Steve Lamoreaux, Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics; Konrad Lehnert, Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics; Maruyama; Michael Jewell, research scientist; Max Silva-Feaver, Mossman Fellow; Tyler Johnson, postdoctoral associate; and graduate students Xiran Bai, Eunice Beato, Eduardo Castro Muñoz, Eleanor Graham, Claire Laffan, and Sukhman Singh.
Heeger said, “ALPHA builds on the success of the HAYSTAC experiment at Yale, and Wright Lab is excited to support this next-generation axion experiment that leverages unique expertise and quantum instrumentation from the Yale group.”
