Guillaume Giroux
Assistant Professor, Queen’s University
Guillaume is an experimental astroparticle physicist and member of the Arthur B. McDonald Canada Astroparticle Physics Research Institute (McDonald Institute). He is part of the PICO collaboration working on data analysis, temperature and pressure systems, and detector research and development. Guillaume is also the NEWS-G group leader at Queen’s University and the NEWS-G collaboration co-spokesperson. The NEWS-G collaboration is developing a new low-background technology to look for low-mass dark matter particles.
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About Guillaume
Guillaume holds a BSc and a MSc from Université de Montréal, where he took part in the PICASSO experiment, searching for dark matter with superheated droplet detectors. He completed his PhD in 2012 from the University of Bern in Switzerland, where he searched for neutrinoless double beta decay with the EXO-200 experiment. He joined Queen’s University in 2014 as a postdoctoral fellow and was appointed to the McDonald institute as an assistant professor in 2017. His current research focus is the search for dark matter with the PICO and NEWS-G experiments at SNOLAB, located 2km underground in the Creighton Mine in Sudbury, Ontario.
About the research
NEWS-G will turn on for the first time this summer, which means everything taking place with the team in the next two years will lead to breakthroughs while exploring new models of Dark Matter. Both NEWS-G and PICO offer students an opportunity to work on smaller collaborations that allow for contributions and impacts to the dark matter search. Whether you’re an undergraduate or master’s student, you can produce a measurement or analysis that could be crucial to the search for dark matter. Guillaume can guarantee students interested in NEWS-G the opportunity to work with fresh data to explore new physics. PICO-500 is also under construction and will provide students with a powerful, hands-on way to witness new experimental physics.
Both experiments are located at SNOLAB, with research labs also located at Queen’s University. Students working on either experiment have the opportunity to work on campus at Queen’s as well as on location at SNOLAB.
Working in the group
Students who are part of the NEWS-G and PICO groups often work with each other, Post-Docs or Guillaume, and have the chance to meet and collaborate with astroparticle scientists from around the world. Each member of the group works on their own projects, which converge towards either the NEWS-G or PICO projects to reach physics goals. This allows for members to create sub-projects to specialize on.
The group meets three to four times per week in addition to individual with students under Guillaume’s supervision. The meetings are splint into current project updates, analysis meetings and general meetings (which can involve the multinational collaboration at large). The group has a rich social and extra-curricular presence with participation at the McDonald Institute outreach events and regular times to socialize in events such as group lunches. Additionally, the physical labs allow for the collaborations to host all members at the same time.
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