Search for people, departments, or email addresses.
Physical & Biological Sciences Division
Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP)
Dr.
Staff
Researcher
Interdisciplinary Sciences Building
315
SCIPP
I'm an Assistant Research Scientist at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP) at University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC). My current physics research plan is mainly focused on the study of lepton flavor universality by the observation of rare pion decays, I’m very involved in an emerging pion decay experiment, the PIONEER experiment, that will run at the PiE-5 pion beam line at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI). For PIONEER, I’m developing the high granularity active target (ATAR). I'm also very interested in the physics at the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) that is going to be built at Brookhaven national Laboratories (BNL). For the EPIC detector at EIC I'm leading on the silicon sensor development for the timing layer at UCSC. My expertise is silicon sensors and, in particular, ultra-fast silicon sensors known as low gain avalanche detectors (LGADs) that allow a timing resolution per hit down to 20 ps. I have been organizing the Cal-bridge mentoring program for a few years and I’m currently in the PIONEER DEI committee. In my free time, I love surfing and mountain biking in beautiful Santa Cruz County.
We are currently in a period in time where there's no clear path forward in the field of particle physics. After the discovery of the Higgs boson the Standard Model is apparently complete. However, many cracks are starting to appear in the Standard Model (e.g. the recent g-2 result). Therefore, it is imperative for the physics community to push even more for new horizons. This effort must include both large-scale experiments (like Higgs factories or the FCC-hh) and small-scale experiments (like PIONEER). The development of crucial technology is imperative in both categories of experiment. My research is focused on discovering what’s beyond the Standard Model; to enable this effort I’m developing timing sensors to achieve full 4D (x,y,z,t) tracking. I’m mostly an expert in Low Gain Avalanche Detectors (LGADs), which are thin silicon detectors with modest internal gain with extremely good time resolution (down to <20ps). PIONEER, in which I’m heavily involved, is a next-generation experiment to measure the charged-pion branching ratio to electrons vs. muons and the pion beta decay with an order of magnitude improvement in precision. I’m positive that PIONEER will be a small experiment with a big impact.
INFN Bruno Toushek Award 2024: https://news.ucsc.edu/2025/02/mazza-physics-award.html
This campus directory is the property of the University of California at Santa Cruz. To protect the privacy of individuals listed herein, in accordance with the State of California Information Practices Act, this directory may not be used, rented, distributed, or sold for commercial purposes. For more details, please see the university guidelines for assuring privacy of personal information in mailing lists and telephone directories. If you have any questions please contact the ITS Support Center.
