King's Responsive RAs 2023-2025

The aim of the Experimental Particle & Astroparticle Physics (EPAP) group is to address some of the major open questions in our understanding of matter through the study of the nature of fundamental particles. In particular, we aim to address many of the open questions in dark matter and neutrino sector.

We also continue to search for new physics, addressing phenomena including dark matter and gravitational waves from astrophysical sources. The LZ experiment recently released world-leading WIMP-search results from its first science run (SR1) using just 60 live days of data. Following an extensive pre-run calibration

and detector maintenance period, LZ is about to enter steady-state operations for the remaining science runs (SR2+) towards a complete 1,000 live-day exposure by 2025/26. This grant period covers the majority of this exploitation phase in which LZ will explore significant new parameter space for both WIMPs and

other well-motivated thermal-relic DM candidates. Physics with high-energy astrophysical neutrinos has a very high discovery potential in the near future. Since first observing them in 2013, IceCube has made a series of observations of astrophysical neutrinos

including sky map, energy spectrum, and flavor structure. We will work on the nutrino flavour measurement and produce the state-of-the-art astrophysical neutrino flavour measurement using the Medium-Energy Starting Event sample. We also play an important role in the SNO+ experiment in Canada, which will collect its main data

to search for neutrino-less double beta decay, hence probing the nature and mass of the neutrino, during this grant period. Our work will enable this and other key measurements (such as solar and reactor neutrino spectra that further probe oscillation parameters) through analysis coordination and a careful study of time correlated backgrounds and detector response.