Colloquium Speaker: Junsong Lin (University of California Berkeley)

Speaker: Junsong Lin (University of California Berkeley)

Title: Hunting for Dark Matter with Helium and Xenon Detectors

Abstract: Dark matter is one of the most profound problems in modern physics. From astronomy observations on different scales from galaxies to the whole universe, we found phenomena that can be explained by unknown non-baryonic mass that does not interact with electromagnetism. Dark matter makes up 26.8% of the mass/energy content of the universe, while ordinary matter makes up only 4.9%. After more than three decades of dedicated attempts to detect dark matter with terrestrial detectors, we make tremendous progress on the sensitivity, even though we have not detected dark matter. I will describe the recent developments in experimental efforts, with an emphasis on detectors based on superfluid 4He and dual-phase Xe time-projection-chamber technology.

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