ROUVEN ESSIG
Professor
Physics and Astronomy
rouven.essig@stonybrook.edu | (631)-632-7990, Math Tower 6-112
Research Group Website
Curriculum Vitae. (Last updated: 2023 Oct 27)

Biography
Rouven Essig is a Professor at the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University. He holds a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Physics (2001) and in Mathematics (2002) from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and a Ph.D. in Physics (2008) from Rutgers University. He held postdoctoral studies at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University (2008-2011), before joining the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University in 2011.

Rouven Essig is a fellow of the American Physical Society (2020) and has received a New Horizons in Physics Prize (2021), a Simons Investigator Award (2019), the American Physical Society’s Henry Primakoff Award for Early-Career Particle Physics (2015), and a Sloan Fellowship (2012).

Research Statement
Essig is a theoretical particle physicist whose research focuses on the search for dark matter and other new particles and forces beyond those that are known. His recent research goals include uncovering the nature of dark matter, which can be attempted with, for example, laboratory experiments and through astrophysical probes. He has helped pioneer several novel detection concepts for detecting dark matter, especially dark matter with masses below the proton. He has been a leader in establishing this as a new and important research direction, which is now attracting significant theoretical and experimental efforts. Essig has also been a leader in conceiving of and motivating new fixed-target experiments to search for new forces, helping to spawn several new efforts.

Essig’s work draws on a range of topics in physics, including particle and astroparticle physics, cosmology, and condensed matter physics. Although primarily a theorist, Essig is co-leading and participating in several experiments searching for dark matter and new forces, all of which were motivated by his theoretical research. In particular, he is a co-spokesperson of SENSEI and a member of Oscura and DarkNESS, which are direct-detection experiments searching for sub-GeV dark matter. He is also a co-spokesperson of the A' Experiment (APEX) and a member of the Heavy Photon Search (HPS), both of which are electron-beam fixed-target experiments at Jefferson Lab searching for a new force mediated by a "dark photon.''