Physics Colloquium: Down-to-Earth Searches for Cosmological Dark Matter with LUX and LZ

Thursday, November 2, 2017

3:30 PM-4:30 PM

Carter Hall, PhD, University of Maryland

A laboratory detection of the Milky Way's dark matter halo would be a spectacular confirmation of modern cosmology. It would also fundamentally extend the standard model of particle physics. The LUX experiment searched for dark matter interactions in an underground particle detector in South Dakota between 2013 and 2016. No evidence was found for the existence of 'Weakly Interacting Massive Particles' (WIMPs). This result and recent results from the Xenon1T and PandaX-II experiments set stringent constraints on the properties of these hypothetical particles. I will review these results, and also describe the status of the LZ experiment, which will explore another factor of 100 in cross-section parameter space starting in 2020.

Contact Information

Russell Neilson
russell.g.neilson@drexel.edu