The Yale Physics Seventh Annual Vernon W. Hughes Lecture was held April 9, 2018 by Prof. Elena Aprile, Columbia University.
Monday, April 9, 2018 - The Search for Dark Matter Weakly Interacting Massive Particles with the XENON project
The nature of the dark matter, a dominant component of the Universe, remains one of the most fundamental open question in physics today despite decades of experimental efforts. A leading class of dark matter candidates are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) and direct detection experiments in deep underground laboratories around the world are actively searching for WIMPs with a variety of detectors and target materials. Liquid xenon detectors such as those developed by the XENON collaboration have shown the best detection capability for WIMPs with a mass larger than 10 GeV/c2 all the way to 100 TeV/c2 scale, which is way beyond the reach of the Large Hadron Collider. The current XENON1T experiment, the first to use several thousands of kilograms of Xe in the largest LXe dark matter detector realized to-date, is leading the field with the best detection sensitivity in the region predicted by popular theory models. I will discuss the status of the field and of the XENON1T experiment.
The Vernon W. Hughes Lecture was established in honor of Vernon W. Hughes, Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale University and Elementary Particle Physicist to be used to fund the the lectorship with a portion used to support the facilites within which the lecturship and other activities of the department take place. Hughes was on the Yale faculty from 1954 until his retirement in 1991. He was Sterling Professor, the highest honor that Yale can bestow.