BLAS CABRERA

Professor in Physics

Stanford University

02/06-26/2012

Professor Blas Cabrera has come to participate in the IFT colloquia, and besides has been working with Ph.D. David G. Cerdeño in the field of Dark matter related issues.

Theme of colloquium:

What makes up the dark matter in our universe?

We will take a tour through the fascinating world of cosmology and particle physics and describe the remarkable understanding that we have of how our universe came into existence. In particular we are interested in what makes up the dark matter. We know that it exists from more and more convincing observations in astrophysics, including weak lensing, cosmic microwave background and supernova as standard candles, and the analysis of the bullet cluster convincingly shows us that it must be in the form of some fluid of particles. Today there are many experiments, including our CDMS experiments, that search directly for dark matter particles passing through the laboratory, there are other experiments, such as GLAST/Fermi looking for gamma rays from dark matter particle-antiparticle annihilations, and finally, the most energetic accelerator in the world, the LHC at CERN, may soon provide direct evidence for the structure of particle physics in the interesting mass range for dark matter. In the second part of the talk, we will tour the fascinating range of experiments in direct detection, indirect detection, and accelerator experiments.