The snowball chamber is analogous to the bubble and cloud chambers in that it relies on a phase transition, but it is new to high-energy particle physics. The concept of the snowball chamber relies on supercooled water, which can remain metastable for long time periods in a sufficiently clean and smooth container (on the level of the critical radius for nucleation). The results gleaned from...
The study of scintillation light yield from liquid argon is interesting for many nuclear and particle physics experiments. Doping a few amounts of xenon in liquid argon could significantly shift the wavelength of scintillation light, time profile, and increase yield of the scintillation light. The measurement will be performed using BACoN system at the University of New Mexico. It consists of...
SingleCube is a cubic-foot pixelated liquid argon (LAr) time-projection chamber (LArTPC) that is a small-scale prototype of the DUNE near detector. It operates in the physics department at Colorado State University (CSU) and it is used to test new technologies and techniques for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). When charged particles pass through LAr in the detector, they...
The ICARUS T600 LArTPC detector successfully ran for three years at the underground LNGS laboratories, providing a first sensitive search for LSND-like anomalous electron neutrino appearance in the CNGS beam. After a significant overhauling at CERN, the T600 detector has been placed in its experimental hall at Fermilab, filled with liquid argon, raised to the nominal drift high voltage, and...
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is located at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in the former Homestake Mine in Lead, SD. The DUNE detector will be comprised of four individual 10 kton liquid argon modules. The first module is scheduled to be operational in July 2026.
For DUNE it is important to understand the detector response to low low-energy neutrino...
Consisting of three large liquid-argon time projection chambers (LArTPCs) located along Fermilab’s Booster Neutrino Beam, the Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) Program is a neutrino oscillation experiment that seeks to address anomalous results from the LSND and MiniBooNE experiments, where excesses of electron-like events could possibly be interpreted as originating from light sterile neutrinos. ...
Despite the lack of direct evidence, there is already an abundance of indirect evidence that points to a non-luminous new form of matter that exists in significant quantities throughout our universe. The theory of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) provides an attractive new candidate particle for dark matter. It describes a relatively heavy electrically-neutral particle that only...
Highly sensitive experiments, such as the LZ dark matter experiment, have backgrounds due to radon emanating out of materials. The radon emanation system at SD Mines is used to reduce radon background by measuring the emanation rate of radon out of these materials. If the emanation rate is too high, those objects can be replaced. Analysis of the emanation rate requires corrections when the...
The CYGNUS collaboration is composed of several directional recoil detection research groups that are proposing a large-scale experiment with a network of directional detectors dispersed globally. This experiment is attractive in the context of dark matter searches because it can penetrate the neutrino floor and has a practical way of confirming the galactic origin of a detected nuclear recoil...
Microbial exopolysaccharides (EPSs) exhibit diverse functionalities and offer a variety of structural options that can be altered to fit a specific purpose. Recent decades have seen the utilization of EPSs as a potential option to assist in the field of drug delivery. Commonly used synthetic polymers have been related to issues regarding toxicity, immunogenicity, unwanted polymer-drug...
Neutrinoless double beta decay (0$\nu \beta \beta $) is a rare decay process and is considered as the most promising way to prove the Majorana nature of neutrinos, that is neutrinos are their own antiparticles. The Large Enriched Germanium Experiment for Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay (LEGEND) aims to build a phased $^{\mathrm{76}}$Ge-based 0$\nu \beta \beta $ decay experimental program with...
The light yield of a small undoped CsI crystal directly coupled with two SiPMs at about 77 Kelvin (K) was measured to be 43.0 ± 1.1 photoelectrons (PE) per keV electron-equivalent (keVee) using X and gamma-ray peaks from an 241Am radioactive source. The operation of an undoped CsI crystal coupled with two SiPMs at 77 K was the first attempt in the world. The high light yield together with some...
Recent interest in the mitigation of greenhouse gases has contributed to an increased amount of research in the field of methanotrophy. Studies have demonstrated that methane-oxidizing bacteria have the ability to utilize methane as their sole carbon and energy source to produce polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHAs, which can be modified to produce renewable plastics. Methylosinus trichosporium OB3b...
Plastics have revolutionized many industries, but their desirable properties also bring disposal challenges. Importantly, plastics are recalcitrant to biological degradation and have negative impacts on the ecosystems in which they accumulate. This research seeks to develop a methodology to depolymerize and convert plastic waste into a commodity. Currently, plastic-rich samples have been...
Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, are a major contributor to climate change and this creates a need for capture of such gases. Current solutions involve pumping captured carbon dioxide into depleted oil and gas fields. However, this runs the risk of potential leaks allowing the carbon dioxide to escape and enter the atmosphere. Fortunately, in the presence of water carbon dioxide...
Sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) have a unique ability to grow under anaerobic conditions using sulfate as a terminal electron acceptor, reducing it to hydrogen sulfide. SRB thrives in many natural environments, deep subsurface environments, and processing facilities in an industrial setting. considering to their ability to alter the physicochemical properties of underlying metals, SRB can...
Fixation of carbon dioxide via direct biocatalytic conversion to liquid fuel presents a possible solution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and produce a valuable product. Studies have been conducted on reducing carbon dioxide electrochemically and enzymatically; however, scale up of these methods is for the most part, nonexistent. Cultivation of microorganisms capable of fixing carbon...
The growing population and industrialization have led to the emission of greenhouse gases, amongst which carbon dioxide is the most persistent in the environment. This gas causes an elevation in the earth’s temperature with serious effects on health as well. The most convenient solution to this problem is carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS). Carbon dioxide sequestration in the form...
Rare Earth Elements (REEs, lanthanides) are a category of 15 metallic elements in the periodic table that have similar physical and chemical properties. These lanthanides are used in a variety of products, including nuclear reactor components, cell phones, magnets, camera lenses, and batteries, and as such are fundamental to industrialized cultures around the world. Lanthanides were supposed...
The particulate methane monooxygenase (pMMO), a membrane-bound enzyme having three-subunits (α, β, and γ) and copper-containing centers, is found in most of the methanotrophs that selectively catalyze the oxidation of methane into methanol. Active sites in pMMO of Methylosinus trichosporium OB3b were determined by docking the modeled structure with ethylbenzene, toluene, 1,3-dibutadiene, and...
Epigenetics is a mechanism of gene regulation without changing the DNA sequence, which is heritable in nature. Epigenetic regulation is poorly studied in prokaryotes and is associated with DNA methylation that regulates the DNA-protein interaction in bacteria which often plays a role in phenotypic variations. Our study focuses on biofilm-forming Desulfovibrio alaskensis G20 (DA G20), which are...
Copper (Cu) is an essential micronutrient required as a co-factor in the catalytic center of many enzymes in bacteria. However, excess Cu is hazardous and can generate pleiotropic effects. Cu has been the metal of choice for piping used in household water distribution systems. Due to its leaching from pipelines, Cu levels are present at elevated concentrations in ground water and in soils...
Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas (GHG) with a Global Warming Potential of 28 - 36 over 100 years. Mining activities (e.g., coal mining) account for 11% of global methane emissions from anthropogenic activities, and CH4 that continues to be emitted from abandoned mines has higher CH4 content (~50 percent higher) than previously estimated. Advancement of the biological method for coal mine...
Neutrinos can change flavor content on their way from their point of origin to the detector via a phenomenon known as neutrino oscillations. Neutrino oscillations have been confirmed over the past two decades in a wide range of experiments, and their measured parameters are now relatively consistent with the modified standard model (SM). However, there are hints that small deviations from SM...
The COHERENT collaboration studies Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering (CEvNS) with high-quality pion-decay-at-rest neutrinos from the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Lab, Tennessee. Through CEvNS detection we can know more about the properties of neutrinos and nuclei. Neutrons that survive thick shielding between the source and COHERENT detectors are a serious...
