Dr. Joseph Izen

Professor

University of Texas - Dallas

*Refreshments Served at 3:15pm in the Student Lounge

Title & Abstract

Search for a Force of the Dark Side

Astronomer have incontrovertable evidence from collisions of galactic clusters, from rotation curves of galaxies, and from gravitational lensing. The protons, neutrons, and electrons forming stars, planets, intergalactic gas and people adds up to only 15% of the mass of the entire Universe. The remaining 85% is "Dark". Dark Matter is still known almost exclusively from it's gravitational influence, but if ordinary matter feels gravity plus at least three known forces, perhaps there are analogous Dark Side forces. At CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the hunt is on for the Dark Photon, a gauge boson akin to the electromagnetic photon, but for a conjectured Dark Force between Dark Matter particles. This talk will describe the ATLAS experiment's search for Dark Photons using LHC collision data. A bonus attraction will be my home movies from inside the ATLAS detector located on the LHC beam line, located 60 m below the surface of Geneva Switzerland.