Edinburgh physicist elected spokesperson of particle physics experiment
Professor Andrzej Szelc has been elected as spokesperson for an international collaboration focused in neutrino detection.
The experiment, known as the Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND), records over a million neutrino interactions per year and is essential for studying neutrino oscillations. It will preform precise measurements of neutrino interactions and search for new particles that might be hidden within the neutrino beam. Located at Fermilab, America's particle physics and accelerator laboratory, the experiment started collecting data in December last year and has already acquired the largest sample of neutrino interactions on argon in the world.
Fermilab is home to a number of particle physics experiments, aimed at understanding the smallest building blocks of matter, and therefore helping answer fundamental questions on what are we made of, how the universe began, and the nature of dark matter and dark energy.
The SBND experiment is a collaboration of around 220 physicists from 41 institutions from the US, UK, Brazil, Spain and Switzerland, and will continue acquiring data at least until 2027, when the accelerator complex will shut down for two years to install an upgrade needed for the future DUNE experiment. Professor Andrzej Szelc will lead the SBND as its spokesperson for a two-year term.
He is the first spokesperson elected from outside the USA.
Professor Andrzej Szelc said:
SBND is an amazing detector that will acquire an unprecedented amount of data and, thanks to the diligent work of many scientists around the World, will be able to extract physics measurement with fantastic precision. It is also a very fun collaboration to work in, with many great contributions from early career researchers: students, post-docs – several of them from Edinburgh – that make this an excellent place to work in. It is a great honour to be elected as the SBND spokesperson and help lead the experiment in this extremely exciting period of data taking and first results.
Professor Andrzej Szelc joined the University of Edinburgh in December 2020. Most of his career has been spent working on developing liquid argon detectors to search for rare processes. He has been part of the Fermilab liquid-argon neutrino programme since 2011 and has worked on measurements of electron-neutrino cross sections, searches for beyond the standard model particles, as well as developing applications for scintillation light in these detectors.