Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory joined with its international partners to break ground on a new beamline that will help scientists learn more about ghostly particles called neutrinos.

The beamline is part of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility which will house the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE, an international endeavor to build and operate the world’s most advanced experiment to study neutrinos.

Yanou Cui, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, joined the DUNE collaboration a few months ago due largely to her work on “boosted dark matter,” a novel type of dark matter model, which can be effectively probed with DUNE experiments.

An international experiment, DUNE brings together more than 1,000 scientists from more than 30 countries around the world.

“I have contributed to the technical design report which will be published soon, and I am also working with some DUNE experimentalists at Stanford University on a separate paper about the search at DUNE for boosted dark matter,” she said. 

Cui joined UC Riverside in 2016. She is an expert on the interface between particle physics and cosmology, including dark matter and the origin of matter-antimatter asymmetry.