Prof. Craig Group
Department of Physics
University of Virginia

Abstract

What is “dark matter”?  Physicists don’t know, and we are working hard to discover its properties!  Many observations from the cosmos are consistent with a mysterious form of matter in the universe with a mass density of more than five times the normal matter that we observe here on Earth (the Standard Model particles).   I’ll review how we know dark matter exists, how we search for it, and then focus on one exciting future experiment:  The Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX) is a planned experiment with unique sensitivity to light dark matter if the particle's mass is below the mass of a proton. I will provide an overview of the theoretical motivation, the main experimental challenges, and projected sensitivities in comparison to other experiments.  Dark matter is one of the greatest questions in fundamental physics, and with LDMX, we could discover its particle nature within the next decade!