Events on Monday, March 3rd, 2025
- Cavendish Tests of Millicharged Relics
- Time: 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
- Place: Chamberlin 5280
- Speaker: Asher Berlin, Fermilab
- Abstract: The simplest cosmologies motivate the consideration of dark matter subcomponents that interact significantly with normal matter. Moreover, such strongly-coupled relics may have evaded detection to date if upon encountering the Earth they rapidly thermalize down to terrestrial temperatures, well below the thresholds of most existing dark matter detectors. This motivates the consideration of alternative detection techniques sensitive to a terrestrial population of slowly-moving dark matter particles. In this talk, I will focus on such a population of millicharged particles, and show how reinterpretations of Cavendish tests of Coulomb's Law, first performed in the late 18th century, provide some of the strongest bounds on this largely unexplored parameter space. Event recording:
- Host: Dan Hooper