News

We congratulate Dr. Pin-Jung Chiu, a former bachelor student and later postdoctoral fellow in our group, who started her new position as an Assistant Professor at National Taiwan University in February 2025. A member of the High-Energy-Physics group in the Department of Physics and the Leung Center for Cosmology and Particle Astrophysics (LeCosPA), her research focusses on experimental neutrino physics.
Pin-Jung Chiu will construct a liquid argon test stand in her laboratory, contributing to LEGEND’s efforts to search for the neutrinoless double beta decay in 76Ge. This liquid argon test stand will serve as a facility to study next-generation wavelength-shifting materials and a new energy-calibration mechanism for the liquid argon shields around the high-purity Ge crystals. In addition, it will be used as a cryostat for characterising germanium detectors in preparation for the tonne-scale, next-generation LEGEND-1000 experiment.

Dr. Yanina Biondi, a former PhD student in our group, has been awarded a prestigious Helmholtz Investigator Group grant. This grant allows internationally outstanding postdocs to establish their own research group in a Helmholtz Association research centre.

Yanina Biondi will use this grant, which started in March 2025, at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. She will address the technological challenges of instrumenting high-voltage systems in liquid xenon time projection chambers in preparation for the construction of the XENON-LZ-DARWIN (XLZD) Observatory. The prestigious 1.75 million Euro grant will be used to cover for 5 years the positions of a doctoral student, a postdoctoral researcher, and laboratory instrumentation.

The Physical Review Letters journal has made a selection of the most relevant articles published in 2024. The work of the XENON collaboration "First Indication of Solar ⁸B Neutrinos via Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering with XENONnT" is one of the selected articles.

In November 2024 the XENONnT dark matter experiment reported that, for the first time, solar ⁸B neutrinos were observed via coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEνNS) on xenon nuclei. This work has been published in Physical Review Letters causing a significant  impact in the community.

We are now delighted to recieve the news that this publication has been selected by the editors of the journal as one of the most relevant of the year 2024.  From our group at the UZH, as leading members of XENON, we express our gratitude to the editors for this recognition and to all our colleagues in XENON for the collective effort made to make this publication possible.

Figures from the GERDA manuscript  "Searches for new physics below twice the electron mass with GERDA" were featured on the cover of  the September issue of EPJ-C.   The paper,  with significant contributions from our group, present new constraints on bosonic keV-scale dark matter candidates with masses between 65 and 1021 keV using data from 105.5 kg-years of GERDA's Phase II exposure.

In the same EPJ-C issue, the first paper from MONUMENT was published, describing MONUMENT's experimental setup, utilized to measure ordinary muon capture (OMC) on isotopes relevant to neutrinoless double-beta decay. The manuscript also features data of OMC on ⁷⁶Se and ¹³⁶Ba, the isotopes critical for searches with current and next-generation experiments  using  ⁷⁶Ge and ¹³⁶Xe targets. The analysis and identification of lines in the ¹³⁶Ba data, highlighted in the paper, were part of the PhD thesis work of our group member Gabriela Araujo.

"What if a mineral could reveal what it’s seen over the millions—or billions—of years it’s been sitting deep within Earth? An interdisciplinary global network of scientists is reviving efforts to unlock the secrets that minerals hold."

In this article, Physics Today journalist Toni Feder describes the efforts of a U.S.-European multi-institutional initiative, including our group, to detect dark matter and learn more about neutrinos. The article details our work on imaging color centers in transparent crystals using the state-of-the-art microscope mesoSPIM.

This work is the focus of the UZH Postdoc grant awarded to our group member Gabriela Araujo and is performed in close collaboration with mesoSPIM developer Dr. Nikita Vladimirov from the URPP Adaptive Brain Circuits in Development and Learning department, and Prof. Patrick Huber from Virginia Tech. Key measurements described in the article, such as fluorescent tracks induced by alpha particles and neutrons in transparent crystals, were recently presented by Gabriela Araujo on behalf of the PALEOCCENE team at the Applied Antineutrino Physics Workshop 2024, and will soon be published in a forthcoming  manuscript.