Georgia Karagiorgi
Research Interest
Associate Professor Georgia Karagiorgi is an experimental particle physicist at Columbia University. She is a leading member of the Columbia Neutrinos and Rare Events Group, and she is involved in physics data analysis for the MicroBooNE experiment at Fermilab; construction and commissioning of the upcoming SBND detector, as part of the upcoming SBN program at Fermilab; SBN physics analysis efforts; design and construction of the future DUNE experiment; and design of the proposed, future GRAMS experiment.
Associate Professor Georgia Karagiorgi is an experimental particle physicist at Columbia University. She is a leading member of the Neutrinos and Rare Events Group at Columbia, and she is involved in physics data analysis for the MicroBooNE experiment at Fermilab; construction and commissioning of the upcoming SBND detector, as part of the upcoming SBN program at Fermilab; SBN physics analysis efforts; design and construction of the future DUNE experiment; and design of the proposed, future GRAMS experiment.
All of these current and future experiments share the same detector technology, that of a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC). MicroBooNE, SBN(D), and DUNE also share the common physics mission of advancing our understanding of neutrinos and their properties, and searching for new physics beyond the Standard Model. Prof. Karagiorgi is also interested in extending the application of the LArTPC detector technology to other areas of physics, including astro-particle physics, for example through the development of the future GRAMS mission.
MicroBooNE is a LArTPC neutrino experiment at Fermilab, and the first large-scale LArTPC experiment operated in the US. It ran at Fermilab during 2015-2020, with the goal of performing a follow-up test of the "MiniBooNE anomaly". Possible interpretations of this anomaly include beyond-Standard Model physics, e.g. sterile neutrinos, non-standard neutrino interactions, etc.
Building on Columbia’s long history in short-baseline neutrino physics and related phenomenology, Karagiorgi's group is leading several analyses on MicroBooNE and the upcoming SBN experimental program at Fermilab, including follow-up investigations of the MiniBooNE anomaly and searches for light sterile neutrino oscillations.
Besides searches for new physics, MicroBooNE and SBN are providing world-leading measurements of neutrino cross-sections that are relevant for current and future neutrino experiments. They also serve as a test setup for future very large (~10-100 kton) liquid argon detectors, such as DUNE, whose goals include the discovery of CP violation in the neutrino sector, the determination of the neutrino mass hierarchy, searches for proton decay and other baryon-number-violating processes, and searches for neutrinos from galactic supernova bursts.
Building on past contributions on MicroBooNE, Karagiorgi's group is also leading the commissioning of the readout system for the upcoming SBND. This system also provides a platform for trigger and data acquisition development toward DUNE, which is critical for DUNE’s physics mission. In particular, Prof. Karagiorgi's group is leading R&D efforts in the area of real-time AI applications for data selection and triggering for LArTPC's.