Abstract

Dark Matter is one of the biggest puzzles in science today. Astronomical observations tell us Dark Matter makes up 27% of our universe and experiences the the gravitational force, yet we still know very little beyond this. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is mankind’s biggest experiment in history, with over 10,000 scientists coming together from around the world to try and understand some of the long-standing questions in science. The LHC has already been extraordinarily successful with the discovery in 2012 of the Higgs boson that explains the origins of mass, and continues to search for new, exotic particles that could explain Dark Matter.

I will introduce the LHC and the largest of the four main detectors, ATLAS . I’ll show you how and why we search for a rich array of new particles predicted by Supersymmetry and the latest results from these searches. As the LHC program moves into its final stage, what further secrets of the universe will we uncover?

About the speaker: Dr Tina Potter is a Fellow at Newnham College. Her personal research interests lie in the discovery of new physics beyond the Standard Model, particularly, Dark Matter. She is searching for signs of new particles that may briefly form in the high energy proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. Primarily, her research focuses on the design of novel and sensitive searches for new physics, such as Supersymmetry, using the ATLAS detector. Supersymmetry offers a potential solution by introducing many new particles, the lightest of which is an excellent dark matter candidate. Her research also involves understanding the potential for the discovery or characterisation of new physics scenarios at future colliders.