Blas Cabrera

Abandoned mines might not be the most obvious places to set up cosmological experiments, but that’s where Stanford physicist BLAS CABRERA and BERNARD SADOULET, of the University of California-Berkeley, search for signs of dark matter. Their efforts have advanced dark matter research, and in recognition they have been jointly awarded the 2013 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics. The prize is named for SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory founding director WOLFGANG “PIEF” PANOFSKY and awarded by the American Physical Society.

The pair’s decades-long Cryogenic Dark Matter Search has brought them to several underground sites in the hunt for direct evidence of theorized weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs (the deep shafts largely shield detectors from cosmic rays and other unwanted particle “noise”). If proven to exist, WIMPs could help define and explain dark matter, which is thought to make up about 25 percent of the energy density in the universe and is responsible for the formation of structure in the universe. This, in turn, could improve our understanding of the evolution of the universe and our interpretation of astronomical observations.

Cabrera, a Stanford physics professor who has a term appointment within the SLAC Particle Physics and Astrophysics faculty, said the prize, which includes a $10,000 award and a certificate citing the recipients’ scientific contributions, is gratifying, and it’s “wonderful to share it” with Sadoulet, a Berkeley physics professor and director of the UC Institute for Nuclear/Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. “We have been leaders of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search work for many years,” he said. “It’s also nice to have the tie with Panofsky, whom I knew and deeply admired for many years.”

Read the full announcement at the SLAC News Center.

— BY GLENN ROBERTS, JR., SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory