USD-Led Consortium Awarded 4 35 Million PIRE Grant from National Science Foundation
The five-year effort by the Partnership International Research and Education program will work to advance germanium materials for developing detectors and other technologies in the study of dark matter and neutrinos.
The consortium involves six universities in the United States, two national labs and four international institutes from Canada, China, Germany and Taiwan.
“The general properties of neutrinos and the nature of dark matter are currently two of the most important questions in fundamental physics,” said Dongming Mei of the Department of Physics at USD and the principle investigator. “Understanding these questions could unlock physics beyond the Standard Model, the basic but incomplete framework for fundamental forces and particle interaction.”
Joining Mei is John Wilkerson, professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Rusty Harris, associate professor at Texas A&M University. Together they lead the group called the Germanium Materials And Detectors Advancement Research Consortium.
The other U.S. institutions involved are Black Hills State University, University of Minnesota, Tennessee Technological University, University of California-Berkeley as well as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
International collaborators include Queen’s University in Canada, Tsinghua University in China, Max Planck Institute in Germany, and Academic Sinica’s Institute of Physics in Taiwan.
To learn more on PIRE: GEMADARC.
