Nuclear Particle Astrophysics (NPA) Seminar (note special day and time), Francesco D’Eramo, UC Berkeley, “Hunting for WIMPs”

Friday May 15, 2015, 2:00 PM → 3:00 PM US/Eastern

WLC 108

A Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) is a well-motivated dark matter (DM) candidate that can be searched for by different experimental strategies. In this talk, I will review the complementary WIMP searches, emphasizing how they are sensitive to physics at vastly different energy scale. Crucially, such a separation of scales may have striking consequences when a connection between different experiments is attempted. This motivates the construction of an Effective Field Theory (EFT) framework to properly connect the different energy scales involved in constraining WIMP models. I will build such a formalism and I will apply it to derive model independent bounds on WIMP interactions. I will conclude with possible future directions, both on extending the EFT machinery and applications to specific models.

DEramo_NPA_Seminar_5152015.pdf