LCAS Monthly Meeting – The Cosmos in the Lab: Exploring the Dark Matter Mass Scale with Direct Detection

While the astrophysical and cosmological evidence supporting the existence of a gravitationally-active dark matter is overwhelming, no signals unambiguously attributable to it have yet been observed in laboratory experiments. The prevailing hypothesis is that the dark matter is comprised of a new fundamental particle not found in the Standard Model of Particle Physics. In that framework, the possible mass of the dark matter particle ranges over 50 orders of magnitude, posing a challenging and exciting landscape for detection. In this talk, Dr. Dylan J Temples of Fermilab will briefly review the evidence supporting dark matter and the properties which a fundamental particle must satisfy to be dark matter. From there, he will discuss the signatures of dark matter models across the range of allowed masses and the detector technologies used to investigate them. Finally, He will provide some outlook on dark matter searches in the future from the viewpoint of an experimentalist.

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