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March 16, 2023 past

Physics Colloquium

101 Osmond and https://psu.zoom.us/j/93946951319?pwd=dFVHR21XbDExR0JQanNBUldENEFvQT09

Physics Colloquium

I will discuss the need to extend the Standard Model of particle physics in order to describe the dark matter, a mysterious substance whose existence can be inferred from cosmological measurements, but whose fundamental nature remains unknown. I’ll discuss how a broad strategy of searching for dark matter using techniques from particle physics and astronomy maximize our chances of successfully discovering its identity, and what this could mean for future research in particle physics.

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2023-03-16 15:45 Tim Tait Casting a Wide Net for Dark Matter
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.