Ashlea Kemp
she/herContact Information
Email Address
ashlea.kemp@stfc.ac.ukBiography
I am an experimental particle physicist based at the STFC Particle Physics Department at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. During my PhD I was awarded a Leverhulme Study Abroad Studentship, where I spent two years as a visiting researcher at several Canadian particle and astroparticle research institutes, including SNOLAB and TRIUMF. As a postdoctoral researcher, I was fortunate enough to work under Prof Art McDonald, 2015 Nobel Laureate recipient, at Queen's University in Canada before moving back to the UK. I was awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship in 2024 to establish a new group to pursue research in experimental searches for elusive "dark matter" particles. My FLF focuses on combining innovative detector instrumentation, quantum sensor technologies, and enhanced analysis strategies to search for dark matter particles in a novel and interdisciplinary program, combining astroparticle, particle physics, and condensed matter techniques.
Research
Project Title
Noble Dark Matter Searches at the Low Energy FrontierProject Summary
Dark matter is one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in particle physics. I will search for this elusive particle using one of the biggest dark matter experiments to ever be built, DarkSide-20k, and one of the smallest, QUEST-DMC. By deploying sophisticated data analysis techniques and cutting-edge detector instrumentation, including quantum sensor technologies, my research will unlock unchartered regions in low-mass parameter space, searching for dark matter particles with masses on the order of the proton, that have yet to be explored despite being well-motivated by theories that can also explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry of our Universe.