News

We congratulate our group member Giovanna Saleh for winning the prize for the best talk in the Astroparticles and Cosmology track at the IFAE 2025 conference.

Giovanna, a PhD student in our group, presented the talk "Primi risultati di LEGEND-200: alla ricerca del doppio decadimento beta senza neutrini" [First results from LEGEND-200: searching for neutrinoless double beta decay] at the IFAE 2025 conference, organized by the Italian INFN in Cagliari (9-11 April 2025).
In her talk she outlined the current status of the LEGEND experiment, with a focus on the results of the first unblinding, including the combined GERDA+MJD+LEGEND neutrinoless double beta decay half life limit.

The first LEGEND Collaboration Meeting of the year 2025 was held in L'Aquila, Italy, in March. It was a precious opportunity for our group to present our work to the Collaboration, share important feedback and contribute to significant discussions for the future of the experiment.

For three of our young the beginning of spring offered the opportunity to participate in two of the most well-known conferences in their field. For Chiara Capelli and Diego Ramírez this journey led them to Los Angeles, California in the United States. There, they presented at this year's UCLA Dark Matter conference, showcasing the status of electronic recoil searches in the XENONnT experiment (Slides), as well as the recent measurement of the coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering (CEvNS) of the solar B8 neutrinos (Slides). At the same time, Florian Jörg was attending the Moriond conference on electroweak interactions hosted in La Thuile in the Italian Alps, where he could present the solar B8 CEvNS result (Slides) in front of an interested audience.

We congratulate Dr. Pin-Jung Chiu, a former bachelor student and later postdoctoral fellow in our group, who started her new position as an Assistant Professor at National Taiwan University in February 2025. A member of the High-Energy-Physics group in the Department of Physics and the Leung Center for Cosmology and Particle Astrophysics (LeCosPA), her research focusses on experimental neutrino physics.
Pin-Jung Chiu will construct a liquid argon test stand in her laboratory, contributing to LEGEND’s efforts to search for the neutrinoless double beta decay in 76Ge. This liquid argon test stand will serve as a facility to study next-generation wavelength-shifting materials and a new energy-calibration mechanism for the liquid argon shields around the high-purity Ge crystals. In addition, it will be used as a cryostat for characterising germanium detectors in preparation for the tonne-scale, next-generation LEGEND-1000 experiment.

Dr. Yanina Biondi, a former PhD student in our group, has been awarded a prestigious Helmholtz Investigator Group grant. This grant allows internationally outstanding postdocs to establish their own research group in a Helmholtz Association research centre.

Yanina Biondi will use this grant, which started in March 2025, at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. She will address the technological challenges of instrumenting high-voltage systems in liquid xenon time projection chambers in preparation for the construction of the XENON-LZ-DARWIN (XLZD) Observatory. The prestigious 1.75 million Euro grant will be used to cover for 5 years the positions of a doctoral student, a postdoctoral researcher, and laboratory instrumentation.