Paules Zakhary

Research

Biography:

Coming from Egypt, Paules Zakhary was one of the five exceptional students in the inaugural class of Misr El Kheir STEM Scholars at the American University in Cairo (AUC), where he received his B.Sc. degree in physics with magna cum laude.

During his undergraduate studies, he joined Prof. Swillam’s group and worked on planar waveguides, which sustain solitons in nonlinear media. In Summer 2017, Paules Zakhary worked as a visiting undergraduate research fellow at Harvard University under the auspicious of Prof. Gabrielse on the Electron Dipole Moment (EDM) experiment.

After graduation, Zakhary pursued his master’s degree in particle physics at the University of Sheffield, UK. He worked with Prof. Vitaly Kudryavtsev and the LZ Collaboration on material screening to define tolerable rates from background sources, which would not put the detection of Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) signals in jeopardy. These WIMPs may be able to explain dark matter, which exists in theory, but so far, no experiments have detected conclusive evidence of it. More specifically, he was running simulations to assess the contribution from all background sources, including intrinsic radioactivity in the liquid Xenon, and emissions from the experimental setup. It extends to subcomponents, with the model accurately representing the physical distribution of contaminants, particularly since (α, n) neutron yields vary by many orders of magnitude depending on the primary constituents of the materials containing the alphaemitting uranium and thorium decay products.

In September 2019, Paules received his M.Sc. (RES) in particle physics, with distinction. In 2020, he joined AstroCeNT pursuing his Ph.D. in Astroparticle physics working on low-mass dark matter detection with the DarkSide collaboration under Prof. Wada’s supervision.

Degrees and titles