Alissa Monte

Biography

Alissa received her Ph.D. from The University of Massachusetts Amherst and her B.A. from Occidental College. She has been working in the field of direct detection of dark matter for eleven years. Her doctoral thesis focused on alpha radiation background studies and related measurements in the DarkSide-50 liquid argon dark matter experiment. She now serves as the Veto Physics Coordinator for the LZ experiment and works on R&D for HydroX; hydrogen-doping liquid xenon detectors. She joined UCSB as a postdoc in 2019.

Research

If galaxies were held together only by the gravity of their luminous matter, they would have flown apart long ago. Numerous indirect astrophysical observations imply the existence of dark matter that interacts gravitationally but not electromagnetically to invisibly bind galaxies together and facilitate cosmological structure formation. Alissa works on LZ, a large liquid xenon experiment that aims to directly detect interactions of dark matter with xenon nuclei. She serves as Veto Physics Coordinator in LZ, overseeing a liquid xenon skin and gadolinium-loaded liquid scintillator outer detector, which are used to tag and reject events from ambient radioactivity that would otherwise swamp the rare dark matter interactions of interest. She also works on R&D towards hydrogen doping of liquid xenon detectors (HydroX) to enable low-mass and spin-dependent dark matter searches.