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Daniel Kodroff

Daniel Kodroff — Graduate Student — Graduate Student
Office: Basement Osmond Laboratory
Address: 104 Davey Lab, Mailbox 167
dsk192@psu.edu
0000000000
Daniel Kodroff
Physics LZ Dark Matter Neutrinos CMA

Hello! I'm a graduate student in the dark matter and neutrinos group lead by Professors Carmen Carmona and Luiz de Viveiros. I currently work for the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) collaboration, a direct detection dark matter experiment. My expertise is in background model building and constraining background rates, which is critical for searching for dark matter and other rare physics events.

Over the past few decades, a number of cosmological measurements have revealed that everything we know, all stars, subatomic particles, and everything in between, adds up to only 15% of the total matter in the universe, while the remaining 85% is made up of the still unknown dark matter. Dark matter doesn’t seem to emit, absorb, or scatter light, and it was only discovered through the gravitational influence it has on other visible matter. A large number of groups worldwide are working on experiments aiming to identify what is dark matter. The LZ experiment is an international collaboration of more than 250 physicists located at the Sanford Underground Research Laboratory in Lead, South Dakota. At the heart of the detector is a dual-phase time projection chamber utilizing a 7 tonne active volume of liquid xenon.

LZ began its first science run in 2021 and recently reported world-leading WIMP dark matter limits. Stay tuned for future results...

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About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.