Search Talks

With the emergence of the dark sector in cosmology,  a variety of modified theories of gravity have come to the fore. I will discuss a framework which can be used to test gravity on large scales and the observational programmes that might lead to the tightest constraints.

The IceCube neutrino observatory is the world's largest high-energy neutrino telescope, utilizing the deep Antarctic ice as the Cherenkov detector medium.  In December 2010 the last of the observatory's 86 strings of optical detectors was deployed, completing the approximate cubic-kilometer array.   With the addition of a low-energy extension, called DeepCore, the observatory has very high neutrino detection efficiency for energies ranging from ~10 GeV to a few EeV.  The low-energy threshold establishes the first steps towards precision neutrino measurements in the Antarctic. Discussed will be early results from this emerging particle physics program as well as initial expectations from studies of potential future detector upgrades towards creating a multi-megaton neutrino detector with O(10 MeV) energy threshold.

Direct dark matter (DM) detection experiments almost always focus on Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), which have a mass in the 1--1000 GeV range.  However, what if DM is not a WIMP?  In this talk, new direct detection strategies for DM particles with MeV to GeV mass will be presented.  In this largely unexplored mass range, DM can scatter with electrons, causing ionization of atoms in a detector target material and leading to single- or few-electron events.  I will present the first direct detection limits on DM as light as a few MeV, using XENON10 data.  Theoretically interesting models can already be probed.  Significant improvements in sensitivity should be possible with dedicated experiments, opening up a window to new regions in DM parameter space.