Daniel Akerib

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Daniel S. Akerib (born June 19, 1962) is an American particle physicist and astrophysicist. He was elected in 2008 a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). [1]

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Biography

Akerib graduated in 1984 with an A.B. from the University of Chicago and in 1990 with a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. [2] A search for the rare decay K + → π + ν ν is the title of his Ph.D. thesis (which finds experimental limits for a particular type of rare decay involving kaons). [3] [4] As a postdoc he did research from 1990 to 1992 at California Institute of Technology and from 1993 to 1996 at UC Berkeley's Center for Particle Astrophysics [2] (which was started in 1989 with funding from the National Science Foundation). [5] In the physics department of Case Western Reserve University, he was from 1995 to 2001 an assistant professor, from 2001 to 2004 an associate professor, and from 2004 to 2014 a full professor. He also chaired the department from 2007 to 2010. [2] Akerib has been a professor of particle physics and astrophysics at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory since 2014, with a courtesy full-time professorship in Stanford University's physics department. [2]

Akerib was involved for about two years (from 2019 to 2020) in the CMB-Stage 4 (CMB-S4) experiment to detect primordial gravitational waves and to gather data about the early universe [6] but is no longer involved.

At Case Western Reserve University from 2008 to 2014, he worked with Thomas A. Shutt on the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment to detect dark matter particles. In 2014 both were appointed to professorships at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University. [7] The two became the leaders of the SLAC establishment of a Liquid Nobles Test Platform. [2] [8] Their group "specializes in detector development, xenon purification, and simulations". [2]

Akerib's 2008 APS fellowship citation is for "significant contributions to direct Dark Matter detection experiments, in particular for his work on the CDMS experiment." [1]

Since the 1990s he has done research on the search for WIMPs, beginning with the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search and in recent years with the Large Underground Xenon experiment and the LUX-ZEPLIN Experiment. He now works on expanding and improving time projection chambers to improve sensitivity for possible detection of WIMPs. Such chambers use liquid xenon as a target medium. [2]

On May 31, 1992, in Lodi, New York, he married Chantal Christ. [9]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are hypothetical particles that are one of the proposed candidates for dark matter.

An axion is a hypothetical elementary particle originally theorized in 1978 independently by Frank Wilczek and Steven Weinberg as the Goldstone boson of Peccei–Quinn theory, which had been proposed in 1977 to solve the strong CP problem in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). If axions exist and have low mass within a specific range, they are of interest as a possible component of cold dark matter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tetraquark</span> Exotic meson composed of four valence quarks

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A strongly interacting massive particle (SIMP) is a hypothetical particle that interacts strongly between themselves and weakly with ordinary matter, but could form the inferred dark matter despite this.

The DAMA/NaI experiment investigated the presence of dark matter particles in the galactic halo by exploiting the model-independent annual modulation signature. Based on the Earth's orbit around the Sun and the solar system's speed with respect to the center of the galaxy, the Earth should be exposed to a higher flux of dark matter particles around June 1, when its orbital speed is added to the one of the solar system with respect to the galaxy and to a smaller one around December 2, when the two velocities are subtracted. The annual modulation signature is distinctive since the effect induced by dark matter particles must simultaneously satisfy many requirements.

The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) is a series of experiments designed to directly detect particle dark matter in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. Using an array of semiconductor detectors at millikelvin temperatures, CDMS has at times set the most sensitive limits on the interactions of WIMP dark matter with terrestrial materials. The first experiment, CDMS I, was run in a tunnel under the Stanford University campus. It was followed by CDMS II experiment in the Soudan Mine. The most recent experiment, SuperCDMS, was located deep underground in the Soudan Mine in northern Minnesota and collected data from 2011 through 2015. The series of experiments continues with SuperCDMS SNOLAB, an experiment located at the SNOLAB facility near Sudbury, Ontario, in Canada that started construction in 2018 and is expected to start data taking in early 2020s.

The XENON dark matter research project, operated at the Italian Gran Sasso National Laboratory, is a deep underground detector facility featuring increasingly ambitious experiments aiming to detect hypothetical dark matter particles. The experiments aim to detect particles in the form of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) by looking for rare nuclear recoil interactions in a liquid xenon target chamber. The current detector consists of a dual phase time projection chamber (TPC).

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Large Underground Xenon experiment</span> Dark matter detection experiment

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Light dark matter</span> Dark matter weakly interacting massive particles candidates with masses less than 1 GeV

Light dark matter, in astronomy and cosmology, are dark matter weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS) candidates with masses less than 1 GeV. These particles are heavier than warm dark matter and hot dark matter, but are lighter than the traditional forms of cold dark matter, such as Massive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs). The Lee-Weinberg bound limits the mass of the favored dark matter candidate, WIMPs, that interact via the weak interaction to GeV. This bound arises as follows. The lower the mass of WIMPs is, the lower the annihilation cross section, which is of the order , where m is the WIMP mass and M the mass of the Z-boson. This means that low mass WIMPs, which would be abundantly produced in the early universe, freeze out much earlier and thus at a higher temperature, than higher mass WIMPs. This leads to a higher relic WIMP density. If the mass is lower than GeV the WIMP relic density would overclose the universe.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">EDELWEISS</span>

EDELWEISS is a dark matter search experiment located at the Modane Underground Laboratory in France. The experiment uses cryogenic detectors, measuring both the phonon and ionization signals produced by particle interactions in germanium crystals. This technique allows nuclear recoils events to be distinguished from electron recoil events.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">ZEPLIN-III</span> 2006–2011 dark matter experiment in England

The ZEPLIN-III dark matter experiment attempted to detect galactic WIMPs using a 12 kg liquid xenon target. It operated from 2006 to 2011 at the Boulby Underground Laboratory in Loftus, North Yorkshire. This was the last in a series of xenon-based experiments in the ZEPLIN programme pursued originally by the UK Dark Matter Collaboration (UKDMC). The ZEPLIN-III project was led by Imperial College London and also included the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the University of Edinburgh in the UK, as well as LIP-Coimbra in Portugal and ITEP-Moscow in Russia. It ruled out cross-sections for elastic scattering of WIMPs off nucleons above 3.9 × 10−8 pb from the two science runs conducted at Boulby.

The Korea Invisible Mass Search (KIMS), is a South Korean experiment, led by Sun Kee Kim, searching for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), one of the candidates for dark matter. The experiments use CsI(Tl) crystals at Yangyang Underground Laboratory (Y2L), in tunnels from a preexisting underground power plant. KIMS is supported by the Creative Research Initiative program of the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation. It is the first physics experiment located, and largely built, in Korea.

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The Cryogenic Low-Energy Astrophysics with Noble liquids (CLEAN) experiment by the DEAP/CLEAN collaboration is searching for dark matter using noble gases at the SNOLAB underground facility. CLEAN has studied neon and argon in the MicroCLEAN prototype, and running the MiniCLEAN detector to test a multi-ton design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LZ experiment</span> Experiment in South Dakota, United States

The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Experiment is a next-generation dark matter direct detection experiment hoping to observe weakly interacting massive particles (WIMP) scatters on nuclei. It was formed in 2012 by combining the LUX and ZEPLIN groups. It is currently a collaboration of 30 institutes in the US, UK, Portugal and South Korea. The experiment is located at about 1,500 metres under the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota, and is managed by the United States Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

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Alvine Kamaha is a Cameroonian-born assistant professor of physics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

References

  1. 1 2 "APS Fellow Archive". American Physical Society. (search on year=2008 and institution=Case Western Reserve University)
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Daniel Akerib". Physics Department, Stanford University.
  3. ↑ Akerib, D. S. (1991). "A search for rare decay K sup + yields. pi. sup +. nu. nu. (abstract of D. S. Akerib's doctoral thesis)". Office of Scientifica and Technical Information, U.S. Department of Energy (osti.gov). OSTI   5260890.
  4. ↑ "A search for the rare decay K+ --> π+vv̄ / Daniel S. Akerib". Catalog, Princeton University Library. 1991.
  5. ↑ Gwynne, Peter (1989). "US Science: New centers established". Physics World. 2 (2): 10. doi:10.1088/2058-7058/2/2/8.
  6. ↑ "Daniel Akerib". Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC).
  7. ↑ "Noted Dark Matter Experts Daniel Akerib and Thomas Shutt Join SLAC Faculty". SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. July 1, 2014.
  8. ↑ Stifter, Kelly (December 10, 2018). "Noble liquid detector R&D with the LZ System Test platform at SLAC" (PDF). LZ Collaboration, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (lz.lbl.gov).
  9. ↑ "Wedding Akerib - Christ". Daily Press (DailyPress.com). June 14, 1992.
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