I’ll begin by reviewing the current status of Direct Detection searches for Dark Matter, an experimental effort begun by Frank Avignone! Then I will turn to the potential discovery of Dark Stars in early data from the James Webb Space Telescope. These would have been the first stars in the Universe, made (almost entirely) of hydrogen and helium, but powered by the heat from Dark Matter...
Astrophysics played a critical role in the discovery of neutrino mass and mixing: A 40-year effort to understand the evolution of the Sun led to a model that could not accommodate the observed pattern of neutrino fluxes, thus demanding new physics. The connection between neutrino microphysics and macroscopic properties of supernovae, neutron star mergers, and nucleosynthesis has become a...
Not quite 90 years ago, Ettore Majorana informed Enrico Fermi “I have found a representation where all Dirac γ matrices are real. In this representation it is possible to have a real spinor that describes a particle identical to its antiparticle.” Such Majorana neutrinos, could potentially provide an explanation for the neutrino’s elusive lightness and perhaps solve the mystery of the...
The discovery of neutrino oscillations gave us proof that neutrinos have mass, a direct contradiction of the minimal standard model of particle physics. But how much mass? Oscillations cannot give a number for the mass, other than that the average of the three masses must be at least 0.02 eV. The mass is needed to build the new standard model, and to help pin down such things as the equation...
A new experiment to search for keV/c^2 sterile neutrinos by a deformed-beta-spectrum technique is in the final stages of construction on the USC campus. The experiment is designed to search in the mass range of a few hundred keV/c^2 to above one meV/c^2. The technique has been simulated and shows great promise. We are convinced that if this first phase is as successful as predicted, the...