Imperial College London

ProfessorHenriqueAraujo

Faculty of Natural SciencesDepartment of Physics

Professor of Physics
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 7549h.araujo

 
 
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Location

 

510Blackett LaboratorySouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Summary

Henrique Araujo is an experimental astroparticle physicist with the High Energy Physics group at Imperial. His work focuses on the direct detection of dark matter, the elusive substance thought to constitute most of the mass in the universe. Large physics experiments located deep underground attempt to detect the very faint and rare collisions of the mysterious dark matter particles with ordinary atoms at the core of very sensitive radiation detectors.

Henrique was involved in the ZEPLIN dark matter search located at the Boulby Underground Laboratory (UK) for about a decade; the programme developed the use of two-phase xenon technology for dark matter searches. He was data analysis coordinator for ZEPLIN-III and became spokesperson for the collaboration in 2010. He joined the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment in 2012. LUX was installed at the 4850-ft level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), located in the former Homestake mine in South Dakota, US. LUX published several world leading dark matter searches until 2017.

Since 2012 he has led the UK teams developing the international LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, and he co-led the development of the LZ Xenon Detector from design through to the end of construction in 2020. LZ will operate at SURF from 2021 and will probe popular models of particle dark matter and rare astrophysical neutrino interactions.

Henrique has also developed radiation detection instruments for spacecraft. He collaborated with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the European Space Agency on the Highly Miniaturised Radiation Monitor (HMRM), a miniature instrument to characterise the radiation environment in Earth orbit. Previously, he was involved in the design of the LISA Pathfinder Radiation Monitor.

He is Co-Director of Research (Physics) and a member of the Executive Committee of the Department of Physics at Imperial. 


Publications

Journals

Araújo HM, Balashov SN, Borg JE, et al., 2023, The MIGDAL experiment: Measuring a rare atomic process to aid the search for dark matter, Astroparticle Physics, Vol:151, ISSN:0927-6505

Aalbers J, Akerib DS, Akerlof CW, et al., 2023, First Dark Matter Search Results from the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Experiment., Phys Rev Lett, Vol:131

Aalbers J, Akerib DS, Musalhi AKA, et al., 2023, Background determination for the LUX-ZEPLIN dark matter experiment, Physical Review D, Vol:108, ISSN:2470-0010

Wass PJ, Sumner TJ, Araújo HM, et al., 2023, Simulating the charging of isolated free-falling masses from TeV to eV energies: Detailed comparison with LISA Pathfinder results, Physical Review D, Vol:107, ISSN:2470-0010

Aalbers J, AbdusSalam SS, Abe K, et al., 2023, A next-generation liquid xenon observatory for dark matter and neutrino physics, Journal of Physics G-nuclear and Particle Physics, Vol:50, ISSN:0954-3899

More Publications