Megavolts Episode 4 - The Search for Dark Matter

Wednesday 19 October 2022

Episode 4 of Megavolts finds us in the HIAF experimental hall looking for dark matter with Dr Lindsey Bignell.   Actually, it’s a practice run, using neutrons instead: dark matter detections are likely to be so rare that we need to have the detectors well and truly tested before we begin live experiments.

Since this interview was shot the SABRE south experiment has been opened in a gold mine in regional Victoria and so the knowledge from Lindsey’s experiments is being put into practice.

For more behind the scenes info about HIAF – the Heavy-Ion Accelerator Facility – and the Department of Nuclear Physics and Accelerator Applications, visit our online tour. It features 360 degree photos, popups with interesting details, and students and staff dropping in to explain what you’re looking at.

Contact

Dr Lindsey Bignell
E: lindsey.bignell@anu.edu.au
T: (02)61259626

Related news stories

Megavolts Episode 1 - What goes on inside the Accelerator

This is the first of the Megavolts series of videos, from the Accelerator Control Room. In this episode Dr Phil Dooley speaks with Dr Annette Berriman about the experiments going on at that moment – smashing lithium-7 into a gold target. The discussion ranges from how lithium is a weird shape,...

Megavolts Episode 2 - Building Bigger Elements

In Episode 2 of Megavolts series of videos from the Accelerator Control Room we speak with PhD student Lauren Bezzina about her research into fusion. In Lauren’s experiments, she bombards targets made of heavy elements, like lead and tungsten, and turns them into an even heavier element –...

Megavolts Episode 3 - Environmental Nuclear Physics

Today’s visit to the HIAF Control room finds Associate Professor Stephen Tims researching sedimentation in the catchment of a lake in China. It seems to have nothing to do with nuclear physics - but thanks to the nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s, the movement of sediment can be studied via traces...

Big Dreams of Very Tiny Things

As a young girl in Bangladesh, Victoria Uttaree Bashu was obsessed with Einstein. Like her inspiration, she is already pushing back the frontiers of physics, three months into her PhD in the Nuclear Physics and Accelerator Applications Department. “Sometimes I see something on screen, and it is the first...