Wednesday 10 January 2018 

Speaker: Dr Joseph Walding (Royal Holloway, University of London)


Title: "A DEAP Search For Dark Matter”

Abstract: The nature of dark matter is one of the major questions in modern physics. First proposed by Zwicky in 1933 to 
explain the motions of the galaxies in the Coma cluster, today there is strong astronomical evidence for dark matter from 
the galactic to the largest cosmological scales, with the most recent results from PLANCK indicating that dark matter 
constitutes 27% of the energy density of the Universe compared to just 5% for ordinary matter.  However despite the wealth 
of astronomical data the composition of dark matter is still unknown.  DEAP-3600 is a dark matter experiment aiming to 
answer this question by searching for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), a leading theoretical dark matter 
candidate motivated by extensions to the Standard Model.  Consisting of a 3 tonne single-phase liquid argon detector 
located 2km underground at SNOLAB, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, DEAP aims to achieve a target sensitivity to spin-independent 
scattering for 100 GeV WIMPs of 10-46 cm2. This seminar will present an overview of the DEAP-3600 experiment with results 
from the first physics analysis as well as an outlook to the next generation of dark matter detectors.