Madeleine J. Zurowski
Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto working on dark matter direct detection.
Dark matter hunter, coffee and puzzle enthusiast.
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My Research
My work for both my MSc and PhD has been on the direct detection of Dark Matter (DM) with the SABRE experiment, while my postdoc work has been on SuperCDMS (non-physicists may find Intro to Dark Matter more illuminating than the following section).
SABRE
SABRE (Sodium iodide with Active Background REjection) is a dual hemisphere experiment hoping to observe the recoil of a sodium iodide (NaI) crystal after collision with a DM particle. The detector is based in both LNGS in Italy, and Stawell in Australia, and is due to start taking data in 2022. The purpose of SABRE (and part of the motivation in locating it in Australia) is to either confirm or refute the modulation observed by the DAMA experiment as having a DM origin. An ultra-low background is key for this search, as in order to conduct a model independent assessment (i.e., without assuming any partiuclar particle interaction model) we should be able to observe a modulation on the order of 0.01 counts per day per kg per keV above any other known background process.
My work focuses on assessing the performance and limits of the SABRE detector through simulation and data analysis in order to understand the best and worst case scenarios we might expect once we go live. In essence, this is about modelling the way that DM and background processes will manifest within the detector, and how well we can identify a modulation in different cases. In order to do this, I have developed a tool called BASTET that is able to simulate the response in a detector for any selection of NREFT operators or DM velocity distributions (as well as a generic, model indepedendent modulation signal), allowing for sensitivity calculations in a variety of different cases. I have also worked in a team that developed DOOM (Digitisation Of Optical Monte carlo), a digitisation tool that takes optical simulations (such as the output of Geant4) and turns them into realistic waveforms, given a defined data acquistion set up.
Pre-COVID I also managed to get my hands dirty (or quite the opposite) with some lab work with our collaborators in Princeton. There I worked on the development of purification techniques and growth of ultra-high purity NaI crystals. As of 2021, these are some of the lowest background NaI crystals ever produced.
Photo credit: Frank Calaprice 2019
Photo credit: Frank Calaprice 2019