Nick Rodd

Email: nrodd@lbl.gov

Tel: (510) 486-4471

Office: 50A-5125A

Personal web page

Biography

Nick Rodd completed his B.Sc., LL.B., and M.Sc. at Melbourne University in Australia, and his Ph.D. at MIT in the US. His 2018 thesis, titled “Listening to the Universe through Indirect Detection,” received the APS dissertation award in both Theoretical Particle Physics and Astrophysics. Nick then joined UC Berkeley as a Miller Fellow, before moving to CERN in 2021 as a faculty member in the Theory Division. In 2024 he moved back to Berkeley, joining the LBNL theory group as a Divisional Fellow.

Research interests

The goal of my research is to determine what makes up the dark matter of our Universe. My work pursues the hypothesis that dark matter is a new particle we have yet to find, and I focus on what I see as the most promising paths to discovery. One of these is the search for heavy dark matter (e.g. WIMPs) in astrophysical datasets, and I study the field theory underlying the decay or annihilation of dark matter, as well as optimizing experimental search strategies looking for hints of these processes. Another direction is the search for ultralight wave dark matter (e.g. axions) where I work to understand the exact nature of the dark-matter wave, and to explore the full potential of new devices we are building to detect that wave. One of the joys of searching for dark matter is the breadth of the field requires me to explore many different areas of physics, and I have used this as an opportunity to study questions unrelated to dark matter in effective field theory, statistics, and even the quantization of gravity. Ultimately, though, my work always comes back to dark matter, as even though it is a challenging problem, I remain optimistic that we will discover its nature in the coming decades.

Selected Publications