New Leader for the Junior Research Group „Astroparticle Physics“

The Junior Research Group (JRG) „Astroparticle Physics“ of the Excellence Cluster Universe has a new leader. Jean-Côme Lanfranchi is the successor of Tobias Lachenmaier who switched to the University of Tübingen in fall 2010.

Jean-Côme Lanfranchi, who was born and raised in Switzerland, has been part of the Technische Universität München (TUM) since his student days. He studied and earned his doctorate at the Chair for Experimental Physics E15 in the area of experimental neutrino physics. He then remained at Chair E15 as a postdoctoral researcher and later as leader of the „Cryogenic Group“.

Lanfranchi‘s main area of research is the direct search for Dark Matter with the help of the low-temperature calorimeter CRESST (Cryogenic Rare Event Search with Superconducting Thermometers) at Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy and the future European large-scale experiment  EURECA (European Underground Rare Event Calorimeter Array).

In their search for Dark Matter, the JRG „Astroparticle Physics“ also uses the underground and the crystal laboratories at the Garching campus. The Excellence Cluster has helped fund both of these facilities. The underground laboratory comprises a laboratory area of over 130 square meters located under a mound six meters thick. It serves as a development and test station for detection apparatus used to track down neutrinos and the elementary particles of the Dark Matter. These detectors are implemented in large-scale international research projects; these include CRESST and EURECA. Thanks to the new technologies and instruments in the crystal laboratory of the TUM, Lanfranchi’s work group has recently been in the unique position of even being able to produce calcium tungstate crystals on their own. These crystals are used as target materials in both of these experiments.