ABSTRACT

The stunning advances of modern cosmology revealed that our cosmos is filled by dark and enigmatic forms of matter and energy. Only a mere 5% can be accounted for by current scientific understanding, with another 27% made up of an invisible substance the existence of which we can only deduce from its ghostly gravitational effects. We call this substance dark matter. To unravel the mysteries of dark matter, particle physicists have built the largest and most complex machine ever created by humankind, the 17-mile long Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. The LHC accelerates bunches of protons to speeds just shy of the speed of light and then collides them with each other 40 million times every second. Apartment-sized detectors allow researchers to scour through these trillions of particle collisions and petabytes of data to find hints of the production of these elusive particles. In this talk we embark on a scientific journey to the mysteries of the universe and join the hunt for dark matter at the LHC. We delve into the fundamental challenges of the undertaking that requires the collaboration of thousands of researchers all across the globe, highlight the technological marvels that make the research even possible and tell the captivating story of how particle physicists try to unveil the universe and shed light into the dark.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Jochen Jens Heinrich joined the ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider as a student in 2013 while working at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. He received his PhD from Ludwig Maximilian University Munich in 2018. Since then he has been at CERN for the University of Oregon, leading a research team that searches for dark matter in form of composite dark meson states in proton-proton collisions recorded with the ATLAS detector.