Description:

Title: What’s the Matter with the Universe?

Speaker: Enectali Figueroa-Feliciano, MIT

Abstract: Dark matter makes up 85% of the mass of the Universe, yet we know very little about what it is. We hunt for dark matter in an old iron mine half a mile underground using detectors operating only thousands of a degree above absolute zero. I will present results from the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) collaboration where we focus on directly detecting dark matter particles with masses between 1 to 10 GeV. Some theoretical models propose much lighter dark matter, in the range of 1 to 100 keV, which might be detected indirectly through their decay or interactions in the X-ray band. I will introduce the Micro-X sounding rocket payload, a high-spectral resolution X-ray microcalorimeter which could make the most sensitive search for these keV-mass dark matter particles in the near future.

Host: Mayda Velasco

Speaker Schedule

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, colloquium