Richard Gaitskell

Last updated

Richard Jeremy Gaitskell (born May 2, 1965) is a physicist and professor at Brown University and a leading scientist in the search for particle dark matter. [1] He is co-founder, a principal investigator, and co-spokesperson of the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment, which announced world-leading [2] [3] first results on October 30, 2013. He is also a leading investigator in the new LUX-Zeplin (LZ) dark matter experiment. [4]

Contents

Career

Gaitskell was educated at Dulwich College and received his BA and MA degrees from Oxford University in 1985. He was a scholar at St John's College and is the grandson of labour party leader Hugh Gaitskell.

In 1985-1989 Gaitskell worked for the investment bank Morgan Grenfell in London, including a spell as an Assistant Director of Morgan Grenfell International.

In 1993 he received his PhD degree from Oxford University. He was awarded a Prize Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1993 and a Center Fellowship at Center for Particle Astrophysics, UC Berkeley in 1995. He was visiting scholar at Stanford University in 1998–2000. He has been a professor at Brown University since 2001.

Gaitskell's academic research focuses primarily on the direct detection of dark matter particles, [5] and he has led several large-scale detection experiments. He was principal investigator on the XENON-10 experiment at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, and a senior member of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search from 2000 to 2005.

In 2007, Gaitskell co-founded the LUX experiment, which is currently operating 4,850 feet underground at the Sanford Underground Laboratory in Lead, South Dakota. More than 100 scientists and engineers across 18 institutions in the U.S. and Europe are involved in the LUX search for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), the leading theoretical model for dark matter particles.

On October 30, 2013, LUX scientists announced the results from the detector's initial 85-day run. [6] While LUX made no detection consistent with dark matter particles, it demonstrated an unprecedented sensitivity reaching below one zeptobarn () WIMP-nucleon cross section for spin-independent couplings. [2] The detector's sensitivity helps eliminate parameter space in which dark matter particles could exist. [7] "There are basically thousands of models of particle physics lying bloodied in the gutter," Gaitskell told the audience at a Brown University colloquium following the results release. "They have been ruled out." [8]

Gaitskell is also a leading investigator in the new LZ (LUX-ZEPLIN) dark matter experiment which will be constructed in the same underground laboratory as LUX.

Awards and honors

Media Mentions and Appearances

Gaitskell has appeared on Richard Hammond Builds a Planet on BBC One, and on Dara O'Briain's Science Club on BBC Two. His work with the LUX experiment has been profiled in Popular Science, [1] the Los Angeles Times [11] and Harper's Magazine. [12] The LUX results were covered widely in the press, including in the New York Times, [13] Science, [14] The Guardian [15] and The Economist. [16]

Related Research Articles

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

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 research facility featuring increasingly ambitious experiments aiming to detect dark matter particles. The experiments aim to detect particles in the form of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) by looking for rare interactions via nuclear recoils in a liquid xenon target chamber. The current detector consists of a dual phase time projection chamber (TPC).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">UK Dark Matter Collaboration</span> 1987–2007 particle physics experiment

The UK Dark Matter Collaboration (UKDMC) (1987–2007) was an experiment to search for Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). The consortium consisted of astrophysicists and particle physicists from the United Kingdom, who conducted experiments with the ultimate goal of detecting rare scattering events which would occur if galactic dark matter consists largely of a new heavy neutral particle. Detectors were set up 1,100 m (3,600 ft) underground in a halite seam at the Boulby Mine in North Yorkshire.

The ArDM Experiment was a particle physics experiment based on a liquid argon detector, aiming at measuring signals from WIMPs, which may constitute the Dark Matter in the universe. Elastic scattering of WIMPs from argon nuclei is measurable by observing free electrons from ionization and photons from scintillation, which are produced by the recoiling nucleus interacting with neighbouring atoms. The ionization and scintillation signals can be measured with dedicated readout techniques, which constituted a fundamental part of the detector.

PICO is an experiment searching for direct evidence of dark matter using a bubble chamber of chlorofluorocarbon (Freon) as the active mass. It is located at SNOLAB in Canada.

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

DEAP is a direct dark matter search experiment which uses liquid argon as a target material. DEAP utilizes background discrimination based on the characteristic scintillation pulse-shape of argon. A first-generation detector (DEAP-1) with a 7 kg target mass was operated at Queen's University to test the performance of pulse-shape discrimination at low recoil energies in liquid argon. DEAP-1 was then moved to SNOLAB, 2 km below Earth's surface, in October 2007 and collected data into 2011.

The Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), or Sanford Lab, is an underground laboratory in Lead, South Dakota. The deepest underground laboratory in the United States, it houses multiple experiments in areas such as dark matter and neutrino physics research, biology, geology and engineering. There are currently 28 active research projects housed within the facility.

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

The Large Underground Xenon experiment (LUX) aimed to directly detect weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter interactions with ordinary matter on Earth. Despite the wealth of (gravitational) evidence supporting the existence of non-baryonic dark matter in the Universe, dark matter particles in our galaxy have never been directly detected in an experiment. LUX utilized a 370 kg liquid xenon detection mass in a time-projection chamber (TPC) to identify individual particle interactions, searching for faint dark matter interactions with unprecedented sensitivity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cryogenic Rare Event Search with Superconducting Thermometers</span>

The Cryogenic Rare Event Search with Superconducting Thermometers (CRESST) is a collaboration of European experimental particle physics groups involved in the construction of cryogenic detectors for direct dark matter searches. The participating institutes are the Max Planck Institute for Physics (Munich), Technical University of Munich, University of Tübingen (Germany), University of Oxford and the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">European Underground Rare Event Calorimeter Array</span> Planned dark matter search experiment

The European Underground Rare Event Calorimeter Array (EURECA) is a planned dark matter search experiment using cryogenic detectors and an absorber mass of up to 1 tonne. The project will be built in the Modane Underground Laboratory and will bring together researchers working on the CRESST and EDELWEISS experiments.

<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.

The Dark Matter Time Projection Chamber (DMTPC) is an experiment for direct detection of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), one of the most favored candidates for dark matter. The experiment uses a low-pressure time projection chamber in order to extract the original direction of potential dark matter events. The collaboration includes physicists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston University (BU), Brandeis University, and Royal Holloway University of London. Several prototype detectors have been built and tested in laboratories at MIT and BU. The collaboration took its first data in an underground laboratory at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) site near Carlsbad, New Mexico in Fall, 2010.

The DarkSide collaboration is an international affiliation of universities and labs seeking to directly detect dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). The collaboration is planning, building and operating a series of liquid argon time projection chambers (TPCs) that are employed at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Assergi, Italy. The detectors are filled with liquid argon from underground sources in order to exclude the radioactive isotope 39
Ar, which makes up one in every 1015 (quadrillion) atoms in atmospheric argon. The Darkside-10 (DS-10) prototype was tested in 2012, and the Darkside-50 (DS-50) experiment has been operating since 2013. Darkside-20k (DS-20k) with 20 tonnes of liquid argon is being planned as of 2019.

<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 Particle and Astrophysical Xenon Detector, or PandaX, is a dark matter detection experiment at China Jinping Underground Laboratory (CJPL) in Sichuan, China. The experiment occupies the deepest underground laboratory in the world, and is among the largest of its kind.

<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 Russia. The experiment is located at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota, and is managed by DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

Daniel Nicholas McKinsey is an American experimental physicist. McKinsey is a leader in the field of direct searches for dark matter interactions, and serves as Co-Spokesperson of the Large Underground Xenon experiment. and is an Executive Committee member of the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment. He serves as Director and Principal Investigator of the TESSERACT Project, and is also The Georgia Lee Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Laura Baudis (1969) is a Romanian-born German particle astrophysicist. She is employed as a full professor by the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her research focuses on dark matter and neutrino physics. She is a member of the science strategy team for XENON as well as the CERN Scientific Policy Committee (2016–18) and the PSI Research Committee for Particle Physics.

Daniel S. Akerib is an American particle physicist and astrophysicist. He was elected in 2008 a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).

References

  1. 1 2 "Inside the hunt for dark matter" , from Popular Science. Published October 2013
  2. 1 2 "First results from the LUX dark matter experiment at SURF," Phys. Rev. Lett. Published March 2014.
  3. ↑ "No sign of dark matter in underground experiment" from Nature. Published October 2013.
  4. ↑ DOE, NSF to fund LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment at Sanford Lab. August 2014.
  5. 1 2 Brown University Research Profile. Retrieved July 2015.
  6. ↑ First results from LUX experiment in South Dakota. Press announcement from the LUX collaboration. Issued October 2013.
  7. ↑ Dark Matter Search Considers Exotic Possibilities. Scientific American. Published January 2014.
  8. ↑ Brown University Colloquium: Richard Gaitskell. November 2013.
  9. ↑ APS Fellow Archive. Retrieved July 2015
  10. ↑ DOE OUTSTANDING JUNIOR INVESTIGATOR PROGRAM AWARDEES. Department of Energy. Retrieved July 2015.
  11. ↑ A hunt for dark matter in a former gold mine. LA Times. Published April, 2013.
  12. ↑ The Quietest Place in the Universe Harper's Magazine. Published May 2015.
  13. ↑ Dark Matter Experiment Has Detected Nothing, Researchers Say Proudly. The New York Times. Published October 30, 2015
  14. ↑ New Experiment Torpedoes Lightweight Dark Matter Particles. Science Magazine. Published October 30, 2013.
  15. ↑ Dark matter stays hidden as detector fails to see a single particle. The Guardian. Published October 30, 2013.
  16. ↑ Absence of evidence, or evidence of absence? The Economist. Published November 2, 2013.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.