Physical Society Colloquium

Dark Matter Meets Condensed Matter

Yoni Kahn

Department of Physics
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

There is overwhelming gravitational evidence that dark matter comprises the vast majority of the mass of the universe, but the particle nature of dark matter remains a mystery. A particularly exciting open frontier is dark matter with mass below the typical WIMP; the peculiar kinematics of galactic dark matter imply that the discovery potential for low-mass dark matter experiments relies crucially on the condensed matter properties of the detector materials. I will give several illustrative examples of detectors being developed to operate in the gap between high-energy and low-energy physics, driven by an incredibly fruitful and rich collaboration between particle physicists, condensed matter physicists, materials scientists, chemists, and quantum measurement specialists on both sides of the theory/experiment divide.