Last week, the whole Penn State LZ group went to the University of Maryland in College Park, MD, for the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Collaboration Meeting: Co-PIs Carmen Carmona and Luiz de Viveiros; postdoc Jack Genovesi; and grad students Yen-Ting Chin, Wei Zha, and Katie Wild. We spend three days meeting with our LZ colleagues, to discuss the latest results and make plans for the upcoming year!

The LZ dark matter experiment held a webinar to announce its latest results on Monday December 8! The analysis was led by former Penn State PhD student, Dan Kodroff, now a Chamberlain fellow at Berkeley Lab; and had numerous key contributions from the Penn State LZ team (Carmen Carmona, Luiz de Viveiros, Jack Genovesi, Yen-Ting Chin, Wei Zha, and Katie Wild…

We are currently recruiting for a postdoc to work on Project 8 at Penn State! If interested, you can see details and apply for the job at: Contact [email protected] for more information!

I wanted to share my collection of “Marvel Super-Heroes who have Physics PhDs“ LEGO minifigures! I have had this collection on my desk for years, but just realized that I hadn’t posted the picture anywhere, so here they are! These are the Marvel super-heroes who, according to Marvel official canon, have Physics PhDs! I started it back in 2018, at the time that the Black Panther movie was coming out.

Last week, Luiz de Viveiros, Matt Brandsema and Rick Mueller attended the Project 8 collaboration meeting on October 27-31 at MIT!  It was a very productive week, focused on the ongoing R&D efforts to develop the ultimate experiment for measuring the neutrino mass!  Thank you Joe Formaggio for hosting us, we had a fun time in Boston!

Last week, Profs. Luiz de Viveiros and Carmen Carmona organized an outreach activity celebrating the “Dark Matter Day”, hosting an information booth in the Osmond Lab lobby. It included a demo of a…