Research & Publications

What do I work on?

I'm interested in probing the microphysics of dark matter through new experimental techniques. We're pretty sure dark matter is out there, but so far we've only been able to detect its interactions with ordinary matter through gravity. The allowed range of parameter space for dark matter spans 90 orders of magnitude. That means dark matter could be lighter than any known particle or heavier than the sun! We have good ideas of where in this huge range of possibilities dark matter could live, and the scientific community is working really hard to probe all of them. I'm interested in a class of models known as "Light Dark Matter", which are dark matter candidates less than the mass of a proton (1 GeV) but still large enough that they're particles, not waves. Dark matter in this range of masses would belong to an entire dark sector. This means there could be all sorts of different types of dark matter particles and force carriers (like a dark matter version of the photon). This means that you can look for dark matter particles in our galaxy, and you can try to make dark matter in colliders! I'm lucky enough to work on two experiments that are searching in both regimes. I work on the SENSEI experiment to look for light dark matter present in our galaxy, and I work on the FASER experiment searching for dark photons produced in high energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.