NWO has awarded Veni grants to two ambitious Nikhef research projects focused on the innovative detection of gravitational waves and of dark matter using the ATLAS detector.
NWO announced this on Thursday. Veni grants offer young researchers the opportunity to further develop their own new research ideas. They are given three years and up to 320 thousand euros to do so.
Particle physicist Sukanya Sinha is currently a postdoc affiliated with the ATLAS experiment at CERN through the University of Manchester. She studied theoretical and experimental physics in India and South Africa and is developing techniques for detecting dark matter in particle collisions within the ATLAS detector.
At CERN, she leads a working group of dark matter researchers collaborating on the LHC experiments. This group also includes colleagues from Nikhef.
A large portion of the gravity in the universe is generated by matter that astronomers cannot see. The nature of this matter is unknown. As part of the ATLAS group at Nikhef, Sinha will develop methods to find invisible components in so-called jets—streams of particles created during proton-proton collisions.
These techniques represent a new addition to Nikhef’s already broad research within ATLAS. Sinha expects to collaborate closely with Nikhef’s theory group on this work.
In addition, there are overlaps with the XENON experiment at Gran Sasso, which is directly searching for dark matter, says Sinha. “Ultimately, observatories will have to demonstrate that what we may be producing in the accelerator is the same dark matter we see between the stars.”
A second Veni grant has been awarded to instrumentation expert Sander M. Vermeulen, who was previously affiliated with Nikhef’s eEDM experiment in Groningen, earned his Ph.D. in Cardiff, and is currently working as a postdoc at Caltech. He will be working on a recent innovation in the field of gravitational wave detection: counting light particles.
Gravitational waves are minute ripples in spacetime caused by collisions of black holes in the universe. Such ripples are currently detected using kilometer-scale interferometers such as LIGO and Virgo, in which laser light patterns vary due to the distance changes between stationary mirrors. These measurements are plagued by quantum noise in the light itself.
For the Einstein Telescope, a future gravitational wave observatory planned in Europe, a new technique could be developed that detects only photons produced by the signal, evading that quantum noise. If successful, it would expand Einstein Telescope’s capabilities to searches for dark matter, high-frequency gravitational waves, and (quantum-) fluctuations of spacetime itself.
