I am a second-year Ph.D. student in physics at UC Santa Barbara, currently involved in the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment with Professor Hugh Lippincott.
Before joining UCSB, I worked in the High-energy Particle Physics lab under Professor Jaehyeok Yoo. We designed experiments to probe feebly-interacting particles.
If you are short on time, here is my CV. If not, please go ahead!
MY STORY
Seoul is not particularly well known for its night sky. So although our high school had a fully equipped observatory, many of us didn’t care. It was always me and only a few other friends spending time around the telescopes. During the winter vacation, we headed out to the countryside taking refuge from the dizzying light pollutions of the city. The pictures we took there was fascinating; almost surreal.
When you’re up at the cold rooftops staring up at the sky for hours, your mind drifts to questions like what is out there? and how did we get here? I wanted to understand the structure of the universe. I got interested in the progress and challenges of observational cosmology.
One of the unsolved problems of modern cosmology is the discrepancy of the Hubble constant between the Cosmic Microwave Background and the Supernova Ia measurements. I wrote my highschool graduation thesis about how the discrepancy might be due to the local gravitational enviornment of our own galaxy.
During my sophomore year, there was a very big workshop named <Workshop for Future Particle Accelerators> held in Korea. I didn’t know much about particle physics at the time, but I joined in with a friend because it looked like a rare opportunity. It turned out to be one of the best summers of my life.
For two weeks, I attended meetings regarding the ongoing experiments in the LHC and schedules for future particle colliders. The workshop turned out to be a very pivotal moment for me, not only because of the things I learned but because of the people I met. Being surrounded by people sharing the same enthusiasm toward physics was an extraordinary experience.
Since then, I became much more willing to interact with people in the field and share their insights. During the Covid-19 pandemic, I tried to keep the interaction alive by attending online meetings and conferences as much as I could. Luckily, large programs like the SLAC Summer Institute and Korean Physical Society meetings were all held online.
I joined my former lab in summer 2019. I designed a scintillator-based experiment to detect millicharged particles in J-PARC. Our detector configuration can provide world leading sensitivity for sub-GeV mass range. You can read more about it in the research page.
I also worked on long-lived particle searches as part of the CMS Collaboration. Long-lived particles have many distinct decay signatures, which require novel methods to properly investigate the parameter space.
Now I am working on the LZ dark matter experiment, which is designed to detect possible weak interactions of dark matter with liquid xenon. The experiment started collecting scientific data in 2022 and will deliver exciting results in the upcoming years.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me!