Shining High- *and* Low-Energy Light on Dark Matter: A Multi-Pronged Approach
Abstract: The mystery of dark matter is one of the greatest puzzles in modern science. What is 85% of the matter, or 25% of the mass/energy, of the universe made up of? No human knows for certain. Despite mountains of evidence from astrophysics and cosmology, direct laboratory detection eludes physicists. A leading candidate to explain dark matter is the WIMP or Weakly Interacting Massive Particle, a thermal relic left over after the Big Bang. I will be presenting the first search results as well as subsequent analyses from the LZ experiment deployed in South Dakota, one of the flagship US DOE dark matter projects, and currently world leading above 10 GeV in mass-energy in terms of setting limits on the WIMP interaction strength following non-discovery. I will also describe the Noble Element Simulation Technique (NEST) software I created to model signal and background interactions in a detector like LZ. However, dark matter may be lighter than we’ve thought for decades: perhaps 1 GeV in mass or even less. I will thus also present on a different technology unrelated to the liquid xenon used by LZ. The snowball chamber uses the phase transition of supercooled water to detect incoming radiation, and do so on a tabletop, bringing HEP back to its pre-large-accelerator roots. Lastly, tangential accidental discoveries made during the quest for dark matter will be discussed, especially a new type of nuclear reactor inspired by xenon detector calibrations.