Rafael Lang

What is the Universe made of? All we know today is that we don't know what most of the matter in the Universe really is. We have a name for it and call it Dark Matter, but we don't know its true Nature. Is Dark Matter made of a new particle species? And if so, what are its properties? How is it distributed? Can Dark Matter interact with us? I build and run detectors that try to shed light on these issues. I am a member of the XENON collaboration that use a liquid xenon target to search for rare Dark Matter interactions. I am in particular interested in unconventional signatures of Dark Matter. Further, I am using these detectors to detect neutrinos from processes in our Sun or from supernova explosions across the Milky Way. I also am involved in the SNEWS network to provide an early alert in case of the next Galactic supernova. In addition to these collaborative efforts, I operate dedicated R&D setups at my lab at Purdue to advance this liquid noble element detector technology. Together with the Windchime, I pursue an entirely novel experimental effort to directly detect Dark Matter in the lab. The Windchime project uses an array of dedicated accelerometers with quantum-enhanced readout to directly detect Dark Matter around the Planck mass through gravitational interactions alone. While Windchime is certainly a long-term research program, it offers a range of interesting science goals, including ultra-light Dark Matter signals, in the short term.