Speaker
Description
The use of ancient minerals for the detection of dark matter requires a systematic understanding of the full pipeline from energy deposition, to track creation, to readout, and a detailed theoretical mapping at each step, verified by experiment. I will provide a brief overview of some of the activities at Queen’s University that aim to fill in some missing elements in this pipeline. This involves an exploration of the expected signal produced by WIMPs, but also other dark matter candidates (composite dark matter), and new physics in other sectors. On the experimental side, I will describe our accelerator-based calibration technique, the minerals that we are exploring, and the methods that we plan to use to connect these results with expected signals of dark matter.
