Chiara Salemi is an Assistant Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley and a Faculty Scientist in the Physics Division at LBNL. Her research focuses on the search for axions, one of the leading candidates to be the universe’s dark matter. Axions are elusive particles—they weigh far less than any of the known particles and interact very feebly. In order to find them, her group builds experiments that operate at fractions of a degree above absolute zero and that rely on quantum sensors to detect the tiny signals that are expected when axions interact with a magnetic field.
Before coming to UC Berkeley, Chiara was a Porat Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University and SLAC National Lab. Chiara got her Ph.D. in physics at MIT, where she built the first laboratory experiment to search for low-mass axion dark matter. Previously, she earned her B.S. in physics and mathematics at UNC-Chapel Hill.