Scott Hertel

Ph.D, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2012)

B.S., College of William & Mary (2003)

I am an experimentalist working on dark matter direct detection.  My group is currently contributing to three projects:

• The LZ Experiment is currently leading the search for WIMP dark matter.  Our local contributions have been in calibration hardware and new physics analysis, including searches an ongoing search for solar neutrino capture on Xe136.
• The Ricochet Experiment is building toward a high-fidelity measurement of reactor neutrino coherent scattering at low energies.  Our UMass contributions have included the cryogenic muon veto, testing of TES-based readout, and recent data analysis from the reactor site.
• The TESSERACT Experiment will deploy several novel technologies with sub-eV thresholds for nuclear recoil scatters, gaining new sensitivities to low-mass dark matter.  Our group is leading the development of a new technology using superfluid 4He as the target material, read out via `quantum evaporation' at the liquid surface.

Recent papers and manuscripts can be found on arXiv here.