Faculty bio | Research website | (541) 346-4820

Tien-Tien Yu is an academic expert in dark matter and cosmology. Yu is a theoretical particle physicist working at the interface of theory and experiment. She is particularly interested in understanding the nature of dark matter, whose existence is known through its gravitational effects on ordinary matter. Yu has studied the nature of dark matter through a variety of different methods, ranging from using collider and accelerator probes at CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider, to produce dark matter, to observing signatures of dark matter in astrophysical and cosmological observations. Most recently, she has co-founded the SENSEI collaboration, which is an experiment utilizing silicon chips, much like those found in digital cameras, to search for dark matter passing through the Earth. Prior to arriving in Eugene, she was a fellow in the theoretical physics group at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and a post-doctoral associate at the Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University in NY. 

Recent Media:
Is dark matter the most powerful wave in the universe? (Symmetry Magazine, April 4, 2023)
Two faculty members earn sought-after NSF Career Awards (Around the O, Dec. 11, 2020)
The Search for Dark Matter Is Dramatically Expanding (Quanta Magazine, Nov. 23, 2020)
Atomic clocks could detect exotic low-mass fields from merging black holes (Physics World, Nov. 9, 2020)
Last chance for WIMPs: physicists launch all-out hunt for dark-matter candidate (Nature, Oct. 2, 2020)
Physicists announce first direct evidence for 'axions' (Live Science, June 17, 2020)
Hacking the physics seminar (Symmetry Magazine, Oct. 22, 2019)