We are pleased to announce that Morgan Clark has been named an outstanding graduate student by the DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program (SCGSR). Awardees spend 3 to 12 months at a DOE National Laboratory working closely with experts at world-class facilities on research projects that address scientific challenges central to the Office of Science’s six research programs. The program enables students to conduct part of their dissertation research while providing access to the expertise, resources, and capabilities available at the DOE laboratories and facilities.
Morgan has been working with John Wilkerson as part of the Experimental Nuclear and Astro-particle Physics group at UNC since 2018 which plays a leading role in both the Majorana Demonstrator and LEGEND experiments searching for neutrinoless double-beta decay in 76Ge. If found, neutrinoless double-beta decay would confirm that lepton number is not conserved, provide important information about the mass of the neutrino, and could give additional insight into the matter-anti-matter asymmetry in the universe. The Large Enriched Germanium Experiment for Neutrinoless double-beta Decay (LEGEND), is a tonne-scale experiment consisting of two phases. The first, LEGEND-200, will deploy ~200-kg of 76Ge detectors in existing infrastructure at Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Gran Sasso, Italy. Morgan will spend 6 months at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) studying the detectors manufactured by ORTEC in Oak Ridge, TN for LEGEND. These detectors will be in the novel Inverted Coaxial Point Contact (ICPC) geometry which was developed by David Radford at ORNL to increase the mass of the detectors used in the experiment without sacrificing their excellent pulse shape discrimination capabilities or energy resolution. The goal of this project is to determine the important parameters of the detectors fabricated by ORTEC and fully characterize each one before the detectors are installed in LEGEND-200, the first phase of the LEGEND experiment. Understanding the performance of each detector is vital to the success of LEGEND.
For complete list of awardees please visit SCGSR Awards | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC) (osti.gov)