Searching for Dark Matter Scattering, on Earth and in the Stars

Speaker: Professor Nicole Bell
Affiliation: University of Melbourne

Abstract

The quest to identify the cosmological dark matter is one of the foremost goals of science today. Yet the very nature of dark matter makes this a formidable task. l outline the status of dark matter direct detection searches and describe new strategies to probe light dark matter scattering using existing detectors, such as the Migdal effect. Complementary information about dark matter scattering can be obtained by considering the capture of dark matter in stars. In this scenario, collisions of ambient dark matter particles with stellar matter can result in sufficient energy loss for the dark matter to become gravitationally bound to the star. I describe applications of dark matter capture in the Sun, white dwarfs and neutron stars, to probe interactions that would be difficult or impossible to observe in experiments on Earth.