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Physik-Institut Bjoern Penning

  • lz diagram

    LUX-Zeplin (LZ) Experiment & XLZD

    The LZ direct dark matter search is presently the world’s most sensitive experiment located in Lead, SD in the United States. It uses 10 tons of liquid xenon and is located 1 mi (1.6 km) deep in the Sanford Underground Research Laboratory. The group has designed and built the Outer Detector (OD) which is the active veto from the main background to dark matter. The group is also deeply involved in dark matter analysis, calibration and interaction finding. Potential projects range from data analysis to building local lab setups to answer open or upcoming questions in the running experiment or to develop strategies for future detectors

  • fridge

    Tesseract

    Tesseract is an upcoming low mass experiment to be installed in the Modane underground laboratory in the Frejus tunnel close to Geneva. The experiment has a multi-target approach, using liquid helium, GaAs, and Sapphire targets read out by identical Transition Edge Sensor (TES) sensors. TES sensors are cryogenic devices that exploit the the strongly temperature-dependent resistance at the superconducting phase transition to detect even faintest energies. Because of their very low energy threshold we need to operate the devices at temperatures closest to absolute zero to avoid all types of thermal noise. Projects include optimization of shielding design, screening of materials for traces of radioactivity, exploring new ways of radiopure manufacturing and working with the local cryogenic lab setup on R&D.

Project Opportunities

Possible Projects 2024

Below is a  non-exhaustive list of projections. If interested please contact any of the following: Prof. Björn Penning (bjoern.penning@uzh.ch), Dr Nicolas Angelides (nicolas.angelides@uzh.ch), Dr Alex Kavner (alexander.kavner@uzh.ch).

 

Exploring Metal 3D Printing for Rare Event Searches

  • Suitable for UZH and/or Renew
  • Use a 3D printer at UZH and screen raw materials at SURF. We then ‘print’ realistic equipment such as sensor holders various source materials  and test how well we can control the radioactivity of the source materials and determine how much radioactivity has been added by printing process, potentially compare different ways of printing/protective gasses
  • Literature: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.13671
     

Light Sensor Test Stand

  • At UZH, involved work th with both, mechanical and electronic shop
  • Build darkbox with improved design: N2 purge, DI water connection and light fibers
  • One or more PMTs, interface with different type of light sensors, DI water connection and light fibers, gas purges, source holders. Need to also setup readout electronics 
  • Will study scintillator and/or light sensor performance as scientific output of the project
     

Light Attenuation Measurement system

  • At UZH
  • Bild attenuation system based on SiPM or PMTs, a long tube that can be filled with different scintillators at different fill heights and a DAQ system to read out and measure light pulse induces by blue LED (OCS type system?)
  • Literature: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41365-019-0542-1
     

Muon Telescope for Qrocodile/Cryogenic R&D

  • At UZH
  • Using SiPMs, 3D primer, scintillators and light fibers we build first a prototype muon detector, improve design, scale up to cover the dilution fridge and provide muon veto for the cryogenic test setup
  • R&D for cryogenic detectors, compare measurements of nanowires or TES w/wo muon veto
  • Literature: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01196 (and many others)
     

Cryogenic Scintillators

  • At UZH
  • Measurement of light yield of scintillators at cryogenic temperatures
  • Studying the use as veto detectors for low mass dark matter detection such as TESSERACT

Bedretto Underground Lab Background Measurements

  • At UZH
  • A few trips to Bedretto for data taking
  • Measurement of the background rates with NaI gamma-ray detector and muon scintillator panels
  • Analyzing background spectrum, deduce activities of U and Th and daughter products
  • Compare to Geant Simulations
     

Development of cost effective radon detector

  • At UZH with possible visits to Bedretto Underground Lab
  • Develop detector which remains reliable through range of conditions (temperature and humidity) 
  • Interact with schools and have a large science outreach component (for development and large scale deployment of detectors) 
  • Literature: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/17/3721

Robust high dimensional modelling of liquid xenon detectors

  • At UZH
  • To enhance their sensitivity, direct detection dark matter detectors have been developing methods to expand their analysis space from the traditional 2 or 3-dimensions to a full 6-dimensional model in space, energy and time.
  • This introduces new challenges in validating the model against the still-limited calibration data. This project would involve using toy simulations to test several goodness-of-fit methods and evaluate their performance to discover various forms of mismodelling.
  • Literature: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.12483