Vahsen Lab

Dark matter is exciting because it links cosmology and elementary particle physics – the study of the Universe as a whole and the study of its fundamental building blocks. Dark matter constitutes the majority of mass in the Universe, but we do not yet understand it in a fundamental way. Dark matter may consist of new types of elementary particles, which were mass-produced in the early Universe, and survived until today. Direct detection experiments aim to detect the interaction of galactic dark matter in terrestial detectors.

The Vahsen group is developing high-resolution gas detectors that can be used to verify whether our luminous Galaxy (the Milky Way) resides inside a halo of dark matter particles, and how these dark matter particles are moving. The group has developed a series of novel Time Projection Chambers where ionization is detected with micro-pattern gaseous detectors (MPGDs). These detectors reconstruct the ionization from nuclear recoils in three dimensions, as shown above.

Related publications:

• Directional Recoil Detection, Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science Vol. 71 (2021)

• Feasibility of a nuclear recoil observatory with directional sensitivity to dark matter and neutrinos, arXiv:2008.12587(2020)

• Compact, directional neutron detectors capable of high-resolution nuclear recoil imaging, NIMA 945 (2019)

• A review of the discovery reach of directional Dark Matter detection, Physics Reports Volume 627 (2016)