NSSC Summer School 2017

Applications to attend the School should include a completed APPLICATION FORM and a completed upload of  ACADEMIC TRANSCRIPT (unofficial transcripts are accepted).

The deadline for receiving the application is May 15th, 2017. APPLICATION IS CLOSED.

Local team

Bob Svoboda is a professor at UC Davis whose interests are in neutrino physics. His NSSC work includes collaboration with LLNL on the deployment and calibration of a neutrino detector for reactor monitoring and development of the Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) facility at MNRC for use in analysis of trace amount of radioactive contaminants in bulk materials.

Mani Tripathi is a Professor of Physics. His research interests span the disciplines of particle physics and nuclear applications. He is involved in searching for dark matter using the LUX/LZ experiment and with the CMS detector. The nuclear applications component consists of radio-assay of materials via neutron activation analysis. In addition, he is working on radiation detectors such as gaseous electron multipliers, tungsten-silicon calorimeters, and next generation silicon-based intelligent charged particle trackers. His group has developed the NEST software package.

Emilija Pantic is an assistant professor at UC Davis whose interests are in the fields of experimental dark matter searches and neutrino physics using noble liquid based detectors. She is also working on development and characterization of novel photosensors and other R&D efforts towards future noble liquid detectors in rare event searches.

Jacob Cutter is a Physics Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis. He is participating in the LUX and LZ dark matter direct detection experiments, as well as DAX, a xenon detector R&D testbed which is being used to directly characterize nuclear recoil backgrounds. In particular, he has been involved with data processing, event position reconstruction analyses, and dual-phase TPC design and operation.

Teal Pershing is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis. His research interests include detector R&D and neutrino physics. Teal’s past work for NSSC has included assaying of liquid scintillator components using neutron activation analysis. Teal is currently working with the SNO+ neutrinoless double-beta decay experiment to develop a liquid scintillator purification technique through nanofiltration. Teal also develops event generators for the RAT-PAC event simulator/analysis package with the WATCHMAN collaboration.

Julie He is working on ANNIE experiment.

James Morad is a graduate student finishing his thesis on direct dark matter detection with the LUX. His interested include detector electronic component R&D as well as software development for data analysis and visualization schemes.

Ben Godfrey is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis. His interests include detector R&D and analog electronics. In the past, he has characterized the radiation hardness of static random access memory for use in L1 trigger development at the CMS detector.

Ben Schlitzer is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis.  Past research includes simulation and R&D for the Cherenkov light yield of cosmic ray muon interactions in support of the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE, now DUNE).  Currently, he is working on an experiment designed to characterize neutron interactions with liquid argon, in support of the DarkSide dark matter direct-detection search.

Aaron Manalaysay is a postdoc in the astroparticle physics group at UC Davis. His research activities have included dark matter direct detection with cryogenic crystals and liquid xenon and very-high-energy gamma-ray astronomy with the up-coming Cherenkov Telescope Array. Currently, he is involved in the LUX dark matter search experiment and R&D efforts for its successor, LZ.

Vincent Fischer is a postdoc in the neutrino physics group. His research focuses on the understanding of neutrino interactions and the search for exotic processes beyond the Standard Model. He is currently involved in the ANNIE experiment, a water Cherenkov detector dedicated to measuring the neutron yield of neutrino interactions in water. He is also involved in the SNO+ experiment, a large multi-purpose liquid scintillator detector whose main goal is to detect the neutrinoless double beta decay process. In the past, he had been working with liquid scintillator detectors to observe reactor neutrinos both for fundamental physics and reactor monitoring.

Tessa Johnson is a postdoc working on rare event detection with noble liquid detectors at UC Davis.  Her research has included searching for exotic processes in double beta decay, precision neutron capture measurements and modeling, and direct dark matter searches.  She is currently focusing on the DarkSide-50 liquid argon dark matter search, including analysis, event reconstruction, and simulation of data.  She also works on precision measurements of liquid argon detector response to neutrons and development of the DarkSide-50 successor.

Morgan research interests lie in looking at physics which could give insight into new physics that is lurking just beyond the standard model. He works mostly on experiments involving neutrino interactions like the SNO+ experiment. SNO+ aims to measure the mass nature of the neutrino by looking for neutrinoless double beta decay, and we are also sensitive to certain modes of invisible nucleon decay.

Luca Pagani is a postdoc working on direct dark matter detection with noble liquid detectors. During his PhD, he worked on the commissioning of the detector and in the analysis of the DarkSide-50 dark matter search data. Currently, he is involved in the analysis of the DarkSide-50 dark matter search experiment and development of its successor, DarkSide-20k.