Exploring Dark Matter

ICTP’s Colloquium Series 2016 continues today at 16:30 with a talk titled Unravelling the Mystery of Dark Matter. The speaker will be Dr. Asimina Arvanitaki from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada.

The Colloquium will be held in the Budinich Lecture Hall.

Dark matter constitutes a significant component of the energy budget of our Universe, and we have diagnosed its existence through its gravitational interaction with us. Our theories of dark matter, though, predict that this glue that is responsible for the existence of our Galaxy should also interact with us in non-trivial ways. After Dr. Arvanitaki reviews these ideas, she will discuss how we can learn more about the properties of dark matter in a variety of new experiments, ranging from atomic clocks to black holes and gravitational waves.

Light refreshments will be served after the lecture.

Asimina Arvanitaki, who has been referred to as the ‘Greek Einstein’, has been at the Perimeter Institute since 2014 and was recently appointed as the first female research chair there, which comes with an $8 million endowment to support her cutting edge research on supersymmetry, dark matter and extra dimensions. In April 2016, she was profiled in the popular Canadian weekly magazine Maclean’s.