BIO

Stefan Knirck is a Fermilab physicist who strives to unlock the mysteries of the Universe by building dark matter detectors. He studied physics in Heidelberg and built a tabletop dark photon detector from scratch at The University of Tokyo in 2016. He obtained his Ph.D. at the Max-Planck-Institute of Physics in Munich in 2020 for studies on MADMAX (Magnetized Disk and Mirror Axion eXperiment). His work was honored with the grade “summa cum laude” and awarded “Best SFB1258 PhD thesis 2020” within his Collaborative Research Center. Since 2021 he is working as a research associate at Fermilab making essential contributions to ADMX (Axion Dark Matter eXperiment), the leading experiment in the field. He is also part of a new effort to search for axions over a much broader mass range: BREAD (Broadband Reflector Experiment for Axion Detection). Stefan loves science, teaching, and spending time with his family.

ABSTRACT

Dark matter should be all around us and weakly interacting with the particles we know. In this slam Stefan will challenge you to do a live experiment to search for dark matter yourself – in just 3 minutes, without props. Be prepared for discovery!