Postdoctoral research
I am employed in the Physics department of the University of Oxford to work in Prof. Jocelyn Monroe's group to work on the DarkSide-20k project. The experiment is currently under construction at Laboratory Nazionale del Gran Sasso (LNGS), in Italy. Research groups over the world take part in the construction of parts of the final experiment. Among them, the UK institutes involved in the DarkSide project are responsible for delivering the Silicon PhotoMultipliers-based photo-electronics to instrument the so-called inner veto. The former is an active detector that will be around the dark matter search volume of DarkSide-20k to tag the background from neutrons --indistinguisable from the dark matter signal that DarkSide is dedicated at searching.
In this context, I am committed into delivering the veto photo-electronics of the veto of DarkSide-20k by making sure that the devices produced in the UK are good enough for high-quality physics runs thanks to electronics tests at liquid nitrogen temperature and QA/QC of the tested devices. These tests are also used to calibrate the photoelectronics of the veto. In parallel, I am responsible for tracking the dust level on the surface of the Silicon in the different UK groups to meet the cleanliness goals of DarkSide-20k that is linked to the background level of DarkSide-20k (from the radioelements present in the dust particulates as well as the Radon background that can be carried out by such dust particulates). On top, I am part of a working group that works towards the preparation of the installation of the photo-electronics of DarkSide-20k once they arrive at LNGS for the final detector assembly.
In parallel of the instrumental work carried out to deliver the photoelectronics of DarkSide-20k, I am working on further improving the sensitivity of DarkSide-20k to light dark matter particules by considering the Earth shadowing of the Dark Matter flux prior to reaching the target detector based at LNGS. This effect is expected to induce a sidereal modulation of the Dark Matter flux, hence of the rate of Dark Matter in the detector (in a certain mass-cross section phase space), providing a discrimination between backgrounds (very dominant in the low mass dark matter search analyses) and the dark matter signal.