Harry Nelson?Touch the Dark

Dr. Harry Nelson is a researcher with the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment, which is searching for dark matter particles, at Sanford Underground Research Facility. Nelson?s focus is the 70,000-gallon tank of ultra pure water that surrounds the detector. He also is the spokesperson for LUX-Zeplin (LZ), the next generation dark matter detector that will be built at Sanford Lab in the Davis Cavern. As a member of the LZ team, Nelson initiated a program that will build an outer detector around the liquid xenon cryostat, which will allow researchers to identify events that are most likely to fake dark matter signals.

The careful study of galaxies, groups of galaxies, and the Big Bang has proven that most of the matter in our Universe is completely unlike the atoms we are made of. A global competition is underway to detect this dark matter in a laboratory on Earth. Nelson?s Neutrino Day presentation, ?Touch the Dark,? will focus on the different experiments around the world and at Sanford Lab.

Nelson?s specialties have been the properties of the b-quark, subtle differences between matter and antimatter, and searches for dark matter. A professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara since 1990, he worked on the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) before joining LUX. Before that he worked for several years at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

A native of Oakland, Calif., Nelson has two daughters and likes to ride the Mickelson Trail on his mountain bike.