"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."
