Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DarkGAMBIT (Global searches for dark matter and new physics with GAMBIT using effective field theory)
Período documentado: 2018-02-01 hasta 2020-01-31
"The search for astrophysical Dark Matter is one of longest and most dramatic ongoing quests in all of science. There is abundant circumstantial evidence that Dark Matter exists, however it has so far eluded all attempts to discover its nature. There are many ideas for what this nature may be, but a frontrunner for many years has been the WIMP, or ""weakly interacting massive particle"". The WIMP would be a new fundamental particle, like electrons, photons, or quarks, but one which interacts very weakly with all the others, such that only its gravitational influence can be easily observed.
Understanding the nature of Dark Matter, while not a pressing social issue, is one of the most profound questions open to the human race. Like the discovery of electrons, x-rays, quarks, or gravitational waves, the impact upon human society, technology, and knowledge will likely be revolutionary.
This project pushes forward the search for WIMPS (and particle dark matter in general) by improving the computational and statistical tools available to physicists to analyse the results of experimental searches for Dark Matter. Namely it extends an open-source statistical package known as GAMBIT to allow sophisticated analysis of a wide range of WIMP-like dark matter models that can be analysed in the framework of ""effective field theory"", a sub-class of quantum field theories in which particle interactions are modelled in terms of their effective low-energy properties rather than hypothetical new high-energy physics. With these improved tools, theoretical physicists will be better equipped to guide their experimental colleagues in constructing new apparatuses to search for the most promosing Dark Matter candidates. On top of this, they may be able to find hints of Dark Matter by combining the results of many experiments together, something generally outside the scope of each individual experiment's goals and capabilities."
Understanding the nature of Dark Matter, while not a pressing social issue, is one of the most profound questions open to the human race. Like the discovery of electrons, x-rays, quarks, or gravitational waves, the impact upon human society, technology, and knowledge will likely be revolutionary.
This project pushes forward the search for WIMPS (and particle dark matter in general) by improving the computational and statistical tools available to physicists to analyse the results of experimental searches for Dark Matter. Namely it extends an open-source statistical package known as GAMBIT to allow sophisticated analysis of a wide range of WIMP-like dark matter models that can be analysed in the framework of ""effective field theory"", a sub-class of quantum field theories in which particle interactions are modelled in terms of their effective low-energy properties rather than hypothetical new high-energy physics. With these improved tools, theoretical physicists will be better equipped to guide their experimental colleagues in constructing new apparatuses to search for the most promosing Dark Matter candidates. On top of this, they may be able to find hints of Dark Matter by combining the results of many experiments together, something generally outside the scope of each individual experiment's goals and capabilities."
"Through this project numerous technical improvements have been made to the open-source global fitting code GAMBIT, to extend its capabilities to deal with Dark Matter effective field theories. As a result of these improvements to GAMBIT, we have produced important new analyses of ""Higgs portal"" dark matter models, in which dark matter is modelled as interacting with Standard Model particles via Higgs bosons, as well as discovered tantalising possible hints of dark matter in a combination of searches at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. A full study of the remaining viable Dark Matter effective theories is in preparation."
"The state of the art for ""Beyond the Standard Model"" global fitting tools has been greatly progressed, such that Dark Matter effective field theories can now be confronted with a full range of relevant experimental data, from across astrophysics, nuclear physics, and particle physics simultaneously in an extensible, well-maintained, and open-source software package. This provides a new and valuable resource to the dark matter physics community, accelerating future analyses and helping the community rigorously confront candidate Dark Matter models with experimental data to best determined future experimental and theoretical research directions."