Open Readings 2025 - DAY 2 - Dr. Laura Šerkšnytė: Searching for Antihelium in Our Galaxy

Laura Šerkšnytė is a Research Fellow at CERN, contributing to the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). She earned her bachelor’s degree at Vilnius University in 2017 and then completed a master’s degree at the Technical University of Munich, where she studied antiproton cosmic ray fluxes. In 2019, she joined the ALICE Collaboration and began her PhD in early 2020, extending her research to light antinuclei.

Dr. Šerkšnytė’s research on light antinuclei, such as antideuterons and antihelium, focuses on their production and interactions with matter in space. She showed that the Milky Way is transparent to cosmic ray antinuclei, making them promising tools for detecting dark matter. This work earned her the André Mischke Award in 2021 and was published in Nature Physics in 2023.

Additionally, Dr. Šerkšnytė studied how particles interact in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. By extending existing methods, she developed a new way to study three-baryon systems, which could help explain whether such particles exist in the dense matter in neutron stars.

Dr. Šerkšnytė was awarded Summa Cum Laude for her thesis, which also won the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS Award for the Outstanding ORIGINS PhD Thesis 2024. In November 2024, she started her position as a Research Fellow at CERN, continuing her work on particle interactions and broadening her research to include heavy-flavor hadrons.