Hunting for dark matter at the Large Hadron Collider – Dr Sarah Williams

Abstract

The discovery of the Higgs Boson by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN marked a tremendous milestone in High Energy Physics: the experimental completion of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The Standard Model provides us with a recipe book for the fundamental building blocks of the universe and the interactions between them. Despite its success to date there are several shortcomings, the lack of a viable candidate for Dark Matter being one of them. This elusive substance, which we now understand makes up around a quarter of the mass-energy content of the universe, has been studied through its gravitational effects in our universe, but has eluded collider, direct and indirect searches to date. It has thus been a key target for searches for new physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) throughout its first and second data-taking runs. This seminar will discuss some of the latest results from the ATLAS experiment at CERN, as well as the prospects for potential discoveries in the future.