UCL HEP Seminars
Seminars are generally held at 4pm on Fridays in room A1 on the top floor of the physics department
A calendar of all seminars in the Physics Department
is available on the Physics Events Calendar page.
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Please send suggestions for topics and/or speakers to Andreas Korn and Lucian Harland-Lang.
Upcoming Seminars
07/10/2016 Leszek Roszkowski (Sheffield and NCBJ)
Particle dark matter: what it is and how to determine its properties
After a brief introduction I will comment on some recently discussed WIMP candidates for dark matter. In particular, I will provide arguments that a supersymmetric neutralino with mass around 1 TeV and well defined properties has emerged as an attractive and experimentally testable candidate for dark matter in light of measured Higgs boson properties and ensuing implications for supersymmetry searches at the LHC. On the other hand, for a wide range of WIMPs, and independent of any specific particle physics scenarios, when a dark matter signal is eventually measured in direct or indirect search experiments, or both, it may prove rather challenging to work out ensuing WIMP properties.
07/10/2016 Sally Shaw (UCL)
The LUX & LZ Dark Matter Experiments: WIMP Hunting in the Black Hills
Discovery of the nature of dark matter is recognised as one of the greatest contemporary challenges in science, fundamental to our understanding of the universe. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) that arise naturally in several models of physics beyond the Standard Model are compelling candidates for dark matter. The LUX experiment, operated 1.5 km underground in the Davis Cavern of the SURF laboratory, USA, is the world leader in the direct hunt for WIMPs. I will present the latest LUX results and describe the unique in-situ calibrations that have allowed low energy nuclear recoil measurements in liquid xenon, greatly enhancing our sensitivity to low mass WIMPs. I will also discuss the status of LUX’s multi-tonne successor, LZ, demonstrating how its sensitivity is ideally matched to explore the bulk of the remaining theoretically favoured electroweak phase space towards galactic dark matter discovery.