School Of Physics Fall Colloquium Series-Dr. Maria Elena Monzani

Speaker: Maria Elena Monzani (Stanford) A Sparkle In The Dark

 Host: Surabhi Sachdev/Laura Cadonati

Title: A sparkle in the dark: data intensive searches for Dark Matter with LUX-ZEPLIN

Abstract: The nature and origin of dark matter are among the most compelling mysteries of contemporary science. There is strong evidence for dark matter from its role in shaping the galaxies and galaxy clusters that we observe in the universe. Still, physicists have tried to detect dark matter particles for over three decades with little success.

This talk will describe the leading effort in that search, the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment. LZ is an instrument that is superlative in many ways. It consists of 10 tons of liquified xenon gas, maintained at almost atomic purity and stored in a refrigerated titanium cylinder a mile underground in a former gold mine in Lead, South Dakota. In 2022, the LZ collaboration released its initial dark matter search results, achieving world-leading sensitivities to a wide range of potential dark matter candidates.

LZ is in the process of accumulating a massive dataset of many petabytes of data and record several billions of particle interactions, only a handful of which might be produced by dark matter interactions. Identifying such interactions requires leveraging advanced detector design and state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. The talk will present the challenges in constructing this large-scale underground experiment and interpreting its data, along with the prospects LZ presents for finally discovering the dark matter particle.

Bio: Maria Elena Monzani is a dark matter data wrangler. Her research field is Astroparticle physics, which focuses on topics at the intersection between particle physics and astrophysics/cosmology, using the tools of data-intensive science. She received a dual Ph.D. from the University of Milano and the University of Paris 7, performing research with the Borexino experiment that measured neutrinos produced by the Sun. She then held a postdoctoral position at Columbia University before joining SLAC in 2007 to work on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Today, Monzani is a lead scientist at SLAC and a senior Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology member at Stanford. She leads the software computing effort for the LZ Dark Matter Experiment and the science operations team for the Fermi satellite. She is also an Adjunct Scholar at the Vatican Observatory and enjoys discussing the shared philosophical foundations of scientific and religious endeavors.