The lecture is free to attend and open to all, but registration is required in advance – book your seat via the registration link on this page.
A pre-lecture reception with tea, coffee and cakes will be held in the Level 8 Common Room, Blackett Building, from 16:45, whilst a wine reception with canapés will follow the lecture at 18:30
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Abstract
Dark Matter appears to make up more than four-fifths of the universe’s mass, but scientists have not yet observed this elusive substance which neither emits nor absorbs light at any wavelength. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs, are the leading candidates for dark matter. They are thought to be extremely numerous – with up to a billion crossing our own bodies every second – but their interactions with ordinary matter are at best very rare.
A team of 250 scientists and engineers from around the world is setting up a next-generation experiment to try to detect dark matter in the laboratory. The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment will be located one mile underground in a former gold mine, deep below the Black Hills of South Dakota. Once it starts taking data in 2020, the sensitivity of the experiment will be unprecedented; at its core is a liquid xenon particle detector, the most successful technology for these searches, pioneered in part at Imperial College. The scientists will be looking for the tiny signals that could indicate dark matter collisions with the xenon atoms.
Leading the UK contribution to LZ is Professor Henrique Araújo, whose team at Imperial is working to develop this next-generation in dark matter detection experiment, designed to probe popular models of particle dark matter before irreducible neutrino backgrounds set in. In his inaugural lecture Professor Araújo will tell the story of the search for evidence of dark matter, and how the LZ detector has been developed to be 100 times more sensitive than existing experiments. He will carry out interactive demonstrations to illustrate the principles that underlie the quest to solve one of the universe’s biggest mysteries.
Biography
Henrique Araújo is an experimental astroparticle physicist with the High Energy Physics group at Imperial College. He graduated in Engineering Physics at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, before gaining a PhD in Physics at Queen Mary & Westfield College on novel superconducting detectors for submillimetre wave astronomy. His research then took him to UCL, where he developed a new calorimeter concept for high energy physics.
He joined Imperial in 2002 to pursue the direct detection of dark matter, the elusive substance thought to constitute most of the mass of the universe. Henrique was involved in the ZEPLIN dark matter search at the Boulby Underground Laboratory for about a decade, becoming spokesperson for the ZEPLIN-III collaboration in 2010. His team joined the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment in 2012; LUX was installed at the 4850-ft level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota, USA, and produced several world-leading results in recent years. Since 2012 he has led the UK teams developing the next-generation experiment LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) with colleagues from the US, Portugal and South Korea.
Henrique’s interests have also included the effects of the space radiation environment on scientific payloads, especially on gravitational wave missions.