Dark Matter: Physicist Laura Baudis on the State-of-the-Art in the Search of Dark Matter

Professor's Baudis talk about the State-of-the-Art in the search of Dark Matter during the Veldhoven Conference: One of the major challenges of modern physics is to decipher the nature of dark matter. Astrophysical observations provide ample evidence for the existence of an invisible and dominant mass component in the observable universe, from the scales of galaxies up to the largest cosmological scales. The dark matter could be made of new, yet undiscovered elementary particles, with allowed masses and interaction strengths with normal matter spanning an enormous range. Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which froze out of thermal equilibrium with a relic density matching the observations, represent a well-motivated, generic classes of dark matter candidates. They could be directly observed via scatters off atomic nuclei in underground, ultra low-background detectors, or indirectly, via secondary radiation produced when they pair annihilate. They could also be generated at particle colliders such as the LHC, where associated particles produced in the same process are to be detected. After a brief motivation and an introduction to the phenomenology of particle dark matter detection, Baudis discusses the most promising experimental techniques to search for WIMPs, addressing their current and future science reach, as well as their complementarity.

See talk on video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Iccsbz91m0&app=desktop