May 09, 2017; Colloquium
Monica Dunford: The quest for the invisible: Dark Matter and the LHC
The nature of dark matter is one of the biggest open questions in both cosmology and particle physics today. If dark matter is a weakly interacting massive particle, as favored in many cosmology and particle physics theories, it can be produced and studied at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. This proton-proton machine is now operating at its near-design luminosity of 13 TeV. During 2016, the data-taking run was wildly successful, producing eight times more data compared to the previous year. This colloquium will discuss searches for dark matter at the LHC with a special emphasis on some new and novel techniques, which improve the sensitivity to dark matter over a large mass range from GeV to TeV masses.