Indirect Searches for Dark Matter

Guest Speaker

Thursday, 6th December 2018 (19:45 - 22:00)

Venue: swmcmeet

Many lines of evidence suggest that about 5/6 of the matter content of the universe is "cold dark matter": it consists of some unknown type of particle that is not part of the Standard Model of particle physics.  Many experiments look for this particle directly, by trying to observe its interaction with the material of their detector.  However, it is also possible to look for dark matter indirectly, by searching for the products of its decay or annihilation out in space.  I will take a look at the various ways in which one can conduct indirect searches for dark matter, and consider the results.  (Spoiler alert: so far, we haven't found it!)

Speaker: Dr. Susan Cartwright

Dr Susan Cartwright graduated from Glasgow University with a BSc in Astronomy and Natural Philosophy (Physics, to most people - but if Natural Philosophy was good enough for Newton it was good enough for Glasgow!). 

She then did a PhD in particle physics, also at Glasgow, and worked in Hamburg, Germany and San Francisco before arriving in Sheffield in 1989.  She is currently working on neutrino oscillations with the T2K experiment in Japan(which, incidentally, doesn't have any evidence that neutrinos travel faster than light - though it does have evidence that accelerators don't much like earthquakes).

Sue Cartwright

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