Niamh Fearon

I am a Graduate student at the Particle Physics sub-department at the University of Oxford. I work as a member of the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, with the primary physics goal of discovery of dark matter particle candidates via direct detection methods. LZ is an international collaboration that consists of over 200 students, researchers and engineers across the UK, US, Portugal and Korea that all work together to achieve this goal. The LZ experiment itself is located at the 4850' level of the Sandford Underground Research Facility, South Dakota, US. We will use 7 tonnes of liquid xenon in a Dual Phase Time Projection Chamber (TPC) to detect recoils with the xenon nuclei at the keV energy scale. We expect to achieve world leading sensitivity to multiple exciting physics signals, including possible detection of solar axions and observations of neutrinoless double beta decay to name just a few. 

Before coming to Oxford, I graduated with a First Class Physics with Astrophysics MPhys (Hons) from the University of Manchester. For my MPhys project during my final year, I worked with Dr. Darren Price and Dr. Andrzej Slezc on the DarkSide-20k experiment. The DarkSide collaboration are also hoping to detect dark matter particle candidates using liquid argon as the detection medium.