Qing "Shilo" Xia
NOTE: E-mail addresses end with @purdue.edu
Education:
Ph.D. in Physics, Yale University, 2020
B.S. in Physics, Nanjing University, 2014
Experience:
Owen Chamberlain Postdoctoral Fellow, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2020-2025
Research:
My main research interest is the direct detection of dark matter. Cosmological observations show that dark matter makes up approximately 85% of all matter in the universe, yet its fundamental nature remains unknown. Although a few decades of experimental effort have placed strong constraints on possible dark matter properties, large regions of viable parameter space remain unexplored.
A major focus of my work is the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, located 4850 feet underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, South Dakota. LZ utilizes a dual-phase time projection chamber (TPC) containing seven active tonnes of liquid xenon to search for dark matter. It currently has the world’s leading sensitivity to weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) — one of the most well-motivated dark matter candidates — and will continue to improve its sensitivity in the coming years. Within the LZ collaboration, I have led detector calibration efforts and improved the simulation frameworks used to model detector responses to both signals and backgrounds.
Beyond WIMPs, I am interested in using LZ's low-background instrumentation to study neutrinos, rare nuclear processes, and other signatures of new physics. In parallel, I am dedicated to developing novel technologies for dark matter and other rare-event searches. Together, these efforts aim to advance our understanding of the universe at its most fundamental level.