I have recently entered the exciting subfield of direct searches for Dark Matter.  Working with the Priceton Particle Astrophysics group (see Profs. Calaprice and Galbiati) and others, I am developing new devices to detect the very-low-energy nuclear recoils from the elastic scattering of "Weakly Interacting Massive Particles" (WIMPs), a promising model for the Dark Matter.  We are focused on liquid argon as a detection medium, collecting the scintillation light and ionization created by the recoiling nuclei.  We are currently building prototypes and operating them in the basement of Jadwin Hall, but actual experiments must be operated deep underground in laboratories like the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL), which the National Science Foundation proposes to build in the Homestake Mine in South Dakota.

In the summer of 1998, my group and I joined the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Experiment, BooNE. This was an investigation of neutrino oscillations in the region of mass-difference and mixing angle where the LSND experiment had seen some evidence for oscillations. The implied mass scale of neutrinos in that region was considerably larger than that indicated by atmospheric and solar neutrino measurements. It would have substantial impact on cosmology if verified. The initial configuration of the experiment, "MiniBooNE," is a 40-ft-diameter tank of mineral oil, instrumented with photomultiplier tubes and positioned 500 m from a new 1-GeV neutrino source.

The Princeton group was responsible for designing and fabricating the phototube support structure, basically everything inside the tank. We installed this structure and the photomultipliers and associated cabling in the tank in the Spring and Summer of 2001. You can see how the construction proceeded here.

In 2007, we reported our first oscillation results (see the reference below), which saw no evidence for the LSND effect. The published analysis was the one developed by the Princeton group. In this analysis, there was an excess of electron-like events at low energies for which there is still no convincing explanation.  The experiment is still running, but the Princeton group is no longer actively involved.

• Peter Meyers, "A Search for Electron Neutrino Appearance at the $\Delta m^2 \sim 1$ eV$^2$ Scale", A. A. Aguilar-Arevalo et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 231801 (2007).