2013 Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics

 The search for dark matter runs deep with physicists Blas Cabrera and Bernard Sadoulet, who have chased this mystery far underground and will be recognized for their work as joint recipients of the 2013 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics. The prize is named for SLAC’s founding director, Wolfgang “Pief” Panofsky, and awarded by the American Physical Society.

While some researchers are scanning the heavens with powerful telescopes to detect dark matter or crashing particles together in an effort to create and study its exotic components, Sadoulet and Cabrera have sought the same answers in deep shafts largely shielded from cosmic rays and other unwanted particle “noise.” Sadoulet is a professor of physics at the University of California-Berkeley and a faculty scientist in the physics division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Cabrera is a Stanford physics professor who has a term appointment at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

CDMS experiments began at an underground site at Stanford University, where they ran through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, and then moved to a former commercial mining site in Minnesota that had been transformed into the Soudan Underground Laboratory.There is active research and development to move the experiments to a deeper site, dubbed SuperCDMS-SNOLAB, at an active mine in Sudbury, Canada, using a larger array of more sensitive detectors placed at a depth of about 6,800 feet – compared to about 2,600 feet for the current set of experiments.

Full story available here.

This article was written by Glenn Roberts Jr. 

–Stanford News Service