3:30–4:30 pm Maria Geoppert-Mayer Lecture Hall
Dark Matter snooker
Maxim Pospelov, University of Minnesota
Despite enormous experimental investment in the searches of particle dark matter, certain well-motivated corners of parameter space remain to be elusive "blind spots" for direct detection. In my talk I will address two of such exceptions: light particles that simply do not have enough kinetic energy to detect, and strongly-interacting particles that quickly thermalize and also become sub-threshold for direct detection. I show that both blind spots can be probed through double collisions of Dark matter -- first with some energetic.
Standard model particles (solar electrons, cosmic rays, particles in a beam, neutrons in nuclear reactors etc) that bring DM to energies above thresholds followed by the scattering inside a detector. This way, I derive novel constraints on light dark matter, as well as strongly-interacting dark matter models, using existing dark matter and neutrino experiments.