About
Ananthakrishnan is a doctoral candidate, jointly hosted by IMT Atlantique, Nantes and the University of Melbourne. He works on the detection of faint dark matter signals in the XENONnT experiment and the research and development for new detectors to be used in the DARWIN experiment. Ananthakrishnan hails from the South-Indian state of Kerala. From 2018 to 2021 attended the Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi for his BSc Honors in Physics. Later, he joined the Department of Physics and Astrophysics, University of Delhi for his MSc in Physics. Here, he specialized in Advanced Nuclear Physics with a keen interest on gamma spectroscopy and data analysis. His master’s thesis project included the study of various statistical methods that are used in the analysis of large amounts of data collected from High Energy Physics experiments, especially collider experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, using the CERN-ROOT Framework. In July 2023, Ananthakrishnan joined the Nuclear Structure Research group at the Australian National University as a research intern, as part of the Future Research Talent program. He worked on the measuring the lifetime of short-lived low spin excited state of Platinum isotopes, using gamma-gamma fast timing method at the Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF).
Ananthakrishnan was awarded the INSPIRE-SHE scholarship by the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India in 2018. In 2023, he was awarded the Future Research Talent Scholarship, by the Australian National University. He was also given an Award for Academic Excellence by the Hindu College, University of Delhi, in 2023. Ananthakrishnan has also qualified various national level examinations in India, like GATE, CSIR-NET etc.
Activities
2024
Journée de l’école doctorale 3-MG, in Angers, FR – Poster: Field Distortion Correction for the XENONnT Experiment
School for Underground Physics 2024 (SOUP 2024), in Bertinoro, IT – Poster: Field Distortion Correction for the XENONnT Experiment
IRN Terascale, in Lyon, FR – Presentation: Latest Results from the XENONnT Experiment
XLZD-Oz workshop, in Sydney, AU – Presentation: Status of the XENONnT Dark Matter Experiment
2025
Les Rencontres de Physique de la Vallée d’Aoste, in La Thuile, IT – Invited Talk: Latest Results from the XENONnT Experiment
2nd Melbourne-CNRS Network Symposium, in Melbourne, AU – Presentation: Searching for Dark Matter with Liquid Xenon Experiments
XENON Collaboration Meeting, in L’Aquila, IT – Presentation: Sensitivity Projections for SR0+1+2 WIMP Search
Interests
His research interests are Particle Physics, Dark Matter, Data analysis, Nuclear Physics and Gamma Ray Spectroscopy.
Ananthakrishnan spends a lot of his free time painting, which has become a habit he is deeply fond of. He also reads and watches movies a lot, and actively participates in ‘movie review’ groups. Ananthakrishnan is also an ardent cricket fan, although not so very good at playing it.