Hamilton Colloquium Series: Neal Weiner, NYU; "The Dark Ages of Dark Matter"

Date
Nov 10, 2016, 4:00 pm5:30 pm
Location
Jadwin A10

Details

Event Description

The search for dark matter is among the most challenging in particle physics, because even the question of how to look for it relies on an idea of what it is. The past decade has brought tremendous new data constraining the most popular scenario - the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle or WIMP. We will consider the implications for this new data and the prospects for discovery as experiments such as XENON and LUX reach maturity. As the WIMP has become increasingly constrained, researchers are looking into other directions, including the axion, but many other scenarios as well. New ideas have gone not just to what Dark Matter might be, but how we might look for it. I will discuss how this new “dark age” is unleashing tremendous creativity in answering that question, and how the next decade may be very different, but a very exciting time for dark matter searches.