Dan Hooper, Fermilab
Monday, December 3, 2012 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm
PAA A-102
A variety of direct and indirect searches for dark matter are currently underway and becoming rapidly more powerful. At the same time, the Large Hadron Collider is opening a new window into the physics of the TeV scale.
In this colloquium, I will discuss why many particle physicists think that the dark matter is likely to be made up of WIMPs, and how expriments are finally reaching the sensitivities needed to test this hypothesis. If dark matter is, in fact, made up of WIMPs, then it is likely that these experiments will soon be -- or currently are! -- capable of detecting the interactions of such particles. If not, then over the next handful of years, experimentalists are going to make it increasingly difficult for particle theorists who want to build viable dark matter models.
In this colloquium, I will discuss why many particle physicists think that the dark matter is likely to be made up of WIMPs, and how expriments are finally reaching the sensitivities needed to test this hypothesis. If dark matter is, in fact, made up of WIMPs, then it is likely that these experiments will soon be -- or currently are! -- capable of detecting the interactions of such particles. If not, then over the next handful of years, experimentalists are going to make it increasingly difficult for particle theorists who want to build viable dark matter models.