Investigations on the Nature of Dark Matter

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This award funds the research of Professor Paolo Gondolo at the University of Utah. The central question addressed in the research is the nature of dark matter, a mysterious substance introduced to explain the measured motion of gas and stars in galaxies, the gravitational force in galaxy clusters, and the formation of galaxies out of the tiny lumps observed in the early universe. It has by now been established that dark matter cannot be made of any known particles. Many theoretical ideas exist for dark matter as a new elementary particle, and many experiments are being performed to test these theories. Professor Gondolo's group studies some of these theories, with the aim of understanding their validity and the ways to test them, and at the same time providing the science community with publicly-accessible assessment tools of theories and experiments. The discovery of dark matter particles, and therefore the direct confirmation of the existence of dark matter, would be a completion of the Copernican revolution, and would be the empirical foundation that the material substance humans are made of is only a minority component of the universe.Technically, the research funded by this award addresses the question of the nature of dark matter by (1) providing state-of-the-art and user-friendly software tools to the particle dark matter community for the computation of cosmic densities and direct and indirect signals from generic models of weakly-interacting massive particles, (2) assess the nuclear physics uncertainties in the predictions of galactic cosmic ray fluxes as backgrounds to the indirect detection of dark matter particles, (3) supply proper statistical meaning to astrophysics-independent analyses of direct dark matter detection data, and (4) unify and complete the theory of generic dark matter scattering off atomic nuclei. The educational component of this award continues a very successful physics outreach program at the local museum and in local schools, seeking to attract young students to science in a fun, energetic, and engaging way so as to ultimately increase the number of responsible citizens and leaders who can address the major issues of our time with basic knowledge of science.