1:00–2:00 pm
Please join us:
Anthony LaTorre’s PhD Thesis Defense
SEARCHING FOR DARK MATTER WITH THE SUDBURY NEUTRINO OBSERVATORY
Dark matter currently makes up approximately 84% of the matter in our universe, but has yet to be observed. A recent model by Grossman, Harnik, Telem, and Zhang proposes a new form of dark matter called self-destructing matter which decays to standard model leptons after an interaction in Earth. Motivated by this model, in this analysis we
perform two distinct analyses looking at high energy events in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory data between 1999 and 2003. In the first, we perform a null hypothesis test on the data between 20 MeV and 10 GeV to look for any data which is not consistent with atmospheric neutrinos. In the second analysis we perform a dedicated search for
back to back lepton pairs from a slow dark mediator in the self-destructing dark matter model and place new limits on the rate of these events.
Committee:
Ed Blucher (chair)
Jon Rosner
David Schmitz
Stephan Meyer
Anthony will be the David & Ellen Lee Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology.