Physics and Astronomy Calendar

I will present an overview of the broad program to determine the nature of dark matter that involves investigations in astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology and particle physics. My research concentrates on testing the hypothesis that weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPS) constitute the dark matter. This hypothesis is testable through direct detection of nuclear recoils at low energy resulting from elastic scattering of WIMPs with nuclei. It is also testable by observing WIMP annihilation products, such as GeV-scale gamma-rays and/or neutrinos, as well as antiparticles in the near-Earth environment. Accelerator facilities, principally the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, will probe the TeV energy scale that should be associated with a WIMP solution to the dark matter question. The interplay between these three areas is the subject of my talk, with emphasis given to the direct detection of dark matter via athermal phonon mediated detectors of the CDMS (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search) collaboration and the use of scintillation in liquid Argon and liquid Neon with the DEAP&CLEAN collaboration.