Speaker: Harikrishnan Ramani, University of Delaware
Title: Searching for new physics in the laboratory and in the cosmos
Abstract:Â Stable particles are a generic prediction of theories beyond the Standard Model and could account for some or all of the dark matter. Many such particles are either too heavy or too feebly interacting to be discovered through conventional means, leaving their relic abundance as one of the primary windows into their underlying physics. Despite decades of experimental progress, large regions of theoretically well-motivated parameter space remain hidden in blind spots of standard search strategies. In this talk, I will present new approaches to probing dark sectors by exploiting advances in atomic physics, nuclear physics, and astrophysics. I will discuss recent results on Higgsino dark matter, QCD axions, and millicharged particles, and introduce new probes of the primordial power spectrum down to kiloparsec scales.