The Department of Physics in the University of Virginia's College of Arts & Sciences will host its annual Llewellyn G. Hoxton Lecture on Thursday, April 9th at 6:00 p.m. in room 301 of Gilmer Hall, located at 485 McCormick Road. The lecture is free to attend and is intended for a general audience. There will be a short reception before the lecture, beginning at 5:15 p.m., in the atrium of the Physics Building, 382 McCormick Road.

“Search for Dark Matter”

Modern cosmology asserts the Universe is filled with dark matter, that controls the evolution of the large scale structure, and determines the form of the individual galaxies. There are compelling arguments that dark matter particles are a class of weakly-interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, which arise naturally in physics beyond the Standard Model. WIMP searches using various low-energy detectors have been conducted around the globe for more than thirty years, with dramatic improvements in scale and sensitivity. After a brief overview of the field, I will focus on a dark matter experiment, PandaX, running in the Jinping Underground Lab, Sichuan, China. The PandaX-4T detector used 4-tons ultrapure liquid xenon as the detection target, and reached a record sensitivity of about ~5 events/ton∙year. The current upgrade to a 20-ton experiment will be discussed, along with the prospect of building the world's “ultimate WIMP dark matter detector” in the next decade.

Parking is available in the Central Grounds Parking Garage on Emmett Street and, after 5 p.m., in the Scott Stadium lots.
For information about this free public event, contact Avery Bledsoe-Duy at 434-924-3782 or ptt3vn@virginia.edu.