Welcome!

We are an experimental particle physics group in the Physics & Astronomy department of the University of California, Irvine. Our main research interest is the search for dark matter, a form of matter that does not emit, absorb, or reflect light, and is thought to make up about 85% of the matter in the universe. Our work attempts to detect the production of dark matter particles in the laboratory, by identifying the interaction of these particles (or their decay products) with ordinary matter. For this, we rely on two different experimental strategies: a proton-proton collider machine with the ATLAS Collaboration using the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, and an electron-positron fixed target machine with the PADME Collaboration using the DAFNE accelerator at Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, Italy. Our group is also involved in the development of new technologies for the next generation of high-energy physics detectors, as well as new machine learning algorithms to improve data analysis and detector performance.