PARTICLE PHYSICIST
Tim Nelson
DR. TIMOTHY NELSON
I'm a particle physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California. My research focuses on understanding the nature of so-called dark matter and how it relates to the visible matter in our universe. In particular, I am interested in scenarios where dark matter is part of a rich "dark sector" of particles and forces.
NEWS AND UPCOMING EVENTS
MY LATEST RESEARCH
The Heavy Photon Search (HPS) experiment searches for a dark-sector analog to the ordinary photon. Because this particle can, in general, mix with the Standard Model photon, it can be produced in ordinary interactions, such as electron bremsstrahlung in a high-Z fixed target.
The heart of the HPS experiment is the Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT), designed and built at SLAC, which employs low-mass, radiation tolerant silicon sensors and high-speed data acquisition in a vacuum chamber inside a dipole magnet to identify the decays of dark photons to ordinary charged particle pairs.
