Fundamental Particles and Interactions
at Stanford University

Grad student rotations available!

Over the last 15 years our group has been central to many developments in the field of neutrino physics. Click here for more of our group history

In recent times, this interest has been focused on searches for neutrinoless double beta decay. The discovery of such a decay would establish the existence of 2-component Majorana Fermions (mundane Fermions, like the electron, are 4-component Dirac particles), demonstrate the violation of the lepton number conservation and, possibly, establish the neutrino mass scale. A short article in Physics World explains the search for neutrinoless double beta decay.

The data taking of the EXO-200 experiment was completed in Dec 2018. This was the first “100kg class” experiment to start taking data and produced some of the most advanced results in the world. We recently published the final neutrinoless double beta decay search with this detector, but data analysis for other topics is still ongoing, specifically in our group.

As the work on EXO-200 is winding down, we are aggressively pursuing the finalization of the design of nEXO, a 5-tonne detector that we hope will become the flagship experiment in this area. Our group is very active in a number of areas of nEXO R&D, including the optimization of charge collection devices, the integration of Silicon Photomultipliers with charge readout, high voltage and detector calibration. We operate a liquid Xenon system at Stanford, with a new, larger one under construction.

In the last several years we have also started a program to develop new measurements in the area of fundamental physics using optically levitated microspheres. This work started from our interest in testing the inverse square law of gravity below 50 micron distance but more recently evolved into other measurements, down to the quantum regime.

We also have a program to develop novel radiation detectors for application to science, homeland security and medical physics.

We have openings for new graduate students in (almost) all of the projects above.