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Alexander KISH (BY/CH)
Scientist in Residency with Voldemārs JOHANSONS
Biography
Alexander Kish (1983) is an experimental physicist specialized in rare-event searches and low-background experiments. He has a diploma in radioecology from the International Sakharov Environmental University (Minsk, Belarus), and obtained PhD in particle astrophysics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland in 2011.
In the span of the scientific carrier, he acquired knowledge in noble gas and solid-state particle detectors, spin chemistry, lasers, photon detection, vacuum and cryogenic techniques, fusion and neutron physics.
Currently a researcher at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, Alex is working at CERN in Geneva on the DarkSide project.
As a member of a global scientific collaboration, he is contributing to the development of large-scale, multi-ton detectors based on liquid argon time-projection chamber technology for particle dark matter searches and neutrino studies.
Why should art and science work together?
"It might sound strange, but I think that science is an art in itself. We can see this in the patterns surrounding us and in mathematical formulas describing various phenomena.
Probably not obvious to outsiders, but there is a great deal of aesthetics going into the design of scientific apparatus and experimental installations.
However, I also sense that to explain this absolute beauty to others, especially those without special knowledge, and the simplicity that comes with the latter is a challenge.
A very basic example is the main topic of my research in the last decade - Dark Matter searches: we know that it exists, but it is invisible and we do not know what exactly it is. Still, we use computer simulations and artistic renderings to somehow represent it, as well as to describe the possible concepts of measurements and data analysis."
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