“In such a large consortium of scientists as the XENON experiment, it is very important to have clear organizational structures in order to further develop the experiment together efficiently and to acknowledge and serve all interests in a balanced way,” says Uwe Oberlack. “I am very pleased that my co-workers have entrusted me with the responsible position of Chair for the next few years.”

And these years will be truly exciting: the XENON collaboration is in the process of expanding the world’s largest and most sensitive detector for the direct search for dark matter in the form of WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) in a major upgrade. WIMPs are considered to be particularly promising candidates for this exotic form of matter. Since the beginning of the XENON project in 2002, successively more sensitive and larger detectors have been developed and installed in the underground Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy. The analysis of existing data from the current XENON1T experiment continues to provide exciting new insights – the collaboration recently reported a surprising signal excess, the source of which is not yet fully understood. At the same time, the researchers are working at full speed on the realization of the follow-up experiment XENONnT, which represents the fourth generation of XENON experiments. With three times the active detector mass of nine tons of liquid xenon and a lower background, as well as a new neutron vetodetector, which is being jointly developed by Mainz and Bologna, even better data will soon be available and the experiment will achieve a sensitivity that seemed unimaginable at the beginning of the project.
The XENON collaboration brings together 163 scientists from 28 institutions in 11 countries – one of them is Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). Professor Uwe Oberlack is one of the founding members of the XENON program and brought the program to JGU with his offer of appointment in 2010. His work group in Mainz is involved in the XENON experiments in terms of data analysis and simulations as well as detector technology. In the XENON1T experiment, it was responsible in particular for the muon veto system and contributed significantly to the xenon feedback and storage system. Uwe Oberlack’s research is an important part of the ^PRISMA+ cluster of excellence and is supported by the detector laboratory there, which he heads together with Prof. Dr. Niklaus Berger.

After Prof. Dr. Manfred Lindner (MPI for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg) and Prof. Dr. Laura Baudis (University of Zurich), Uwe Oberlack is the third chair of the collaboration.