Connecting the Dark Side and Fundamental Physics – Mark Trodden

Date: Thu. January 27th, 2005, 4:15 pm-5:15 pm
Location: Rockefeller 301

The universe is composed of normal matter, dark matter and a component that is causing cosmic acceleration. The existence of all three of these components poses a challenge to fundamental physics; the nature of dark matter remains unknown, dark energy or its equivalent is a complete mystery and even baryons, which we see all around us, should have annihilated with their antiparticles long before galaxies formed. In this colloquium I will briefly review the evidence for each of these components before discussing the associated problems and their possible resolutions. The focus will on the importance of connecting cosmic observations with both theoretical and experimental progress in fundamental physics. In the last part of the talk I will describe some speculative ideas on the origin of cosmic acceleration.