Events at Physics |
Events on Wednesday, February 15th, 2012
- NPAC (Nuclear/Particle/Astro/Cosmo) Forum
- Hunting for Dark Matter in Antarctica
- Time: 11:00 am
- Place: 5280 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Carsten Rott, Ohio State University
- Abstract: Despite overwhelming evidence that it composes the vast majority of the mass in the Universe, dark matter's particle properties literally remain in the dark. Identifying the mysterious nature of dark matter is one of today's most pressing scientific problems and is being sought for using colliders, direct-detection experiments, and powerful indirect techniques. With the completion of the gigaton-scale IceCube neutrino telescope a new era in astro-particle physics has begun.
IceCube exploits the excellent optical properties of the ice beneath the South Pole to detect neutrinos through the Cherenkov light emission of secondary particles produced by neutrino interactions. Its unprecedented size will finally allow us to address long standing questions such as the sources of cosmic rays and unknown properties of neutrinos. IceCube further provides a novel discovery potential for dark matter through striking neutrino signatures that may further shed light on its fundamental particle properties and its distribution in the Milky Way. I will discuss our recent results on the search for dark matter and new ways to achieve greater sensitivity. I will conclude by discussing ideas towards a new low-energy threshold multi-megaton ice Cherenkov array (MICA). Such a detector would provide exciting possibilities for the study of neutrino properties, supernova burst neutrinos, Galactic neutrino sources, and dark matter.
- Host: Halzen