Colloquium

Physics Colloquium - Looking for dark matter with the experiment DEAP-3600

Michela Lai
University of Cagliari
Tuesday, October 5, 2021
15:30
Virtual talk over Zoom

Only about 5 % of the energy in the Universe is made of particles that we can actually observe, all described in the Standard  Model. Most of the matter in the Universe is actually "dark", as it is composed by particles which cannot be observed at any frequency. Still, this dark matter is massive, so its gravity is felt at both galactic and intergalactic scales, since the very early Universe. A wide assortment of dark matter candidates have been purposed since today; still, in order to claim their existence and understand their nature, a detection in a laboratory is needed. One way is to wait for dark matter particles to interact with a liquid argon target, in order to look to the peculiar scintillation light released by the argon. DEAP-3600 is the largest running dark matter detector filled with liquid argon. After an introduction to the dark matter search in the experiment, the present contribution resumes the last results performed with the detector, whose target mass allowed to set world-leading limits for several dark matter candidates and dark matter interactions with ordinary matter.

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