Closing In On Dark Matter – Dan Hooper

Date: Thu. November 17th, 2011, 4:15 pm-5:15 pm
Location: Rockefeller 301

A variety of direct and indirect searches for dark matter are currently underway, a number of which have even reported observations which could be interpreted as hints of a signal. In this talk, I will discuss why particle physicists think that dark matter is likely to be made up of WIMPs, and how experiments are finally reaching the sensitivities needed to test the WIMP-hypothesis. If dark matter is, in fact, made up of WIMPs, then it seems likely that at least some of the search strategies being employed will be successful in the coming few years. If not, their null results are going to make it increasingly difficult to build viable particle dark matter models.