Place: 4274 Chamberlin (refreshments will be served)
Speaker: Kimberly Palladino, UW Department of Physics
Abstract: For particle physicists, determining the nature of Dark Matter is one of the greatest open mysteries. An abundance of astrophysical evidence indicates that the matter density of the universe is dominated by a new form of matter, which played a key role in growth of large scale structure. One candidate for Dark Matter is the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP). We hope to detect WIMPS by seeing them scattering off of the target materials in our detectors. Liquid xenon has proved itself an excellent target, and LZ is a dual-phase TPC that will begin taking science data in 2020. Much of the originally proposed parameter space for WIMPS has been excluded over the past few decades, so I will also delve into the sociology of working on direct dark matter searches.