Search for Dark Matter

Angie Reisetter
Physics Department
St. Olaf College

I'll be talking about the international search for dark matter, the effort to figure out what nearly 90% of the matter in the universe actually is.  We're pretty sure it's there, but we know very little about it.  We've been unable to detect it directly here on earth, so competition to be the first to see it is intense, and several very different search methods are being employed. 

I'll talk generally about what we know about dark matter and how we go about looking for it, and then I'll focus on the efforts of the experiment I work on, the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search.  Housed in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in northern Minnesota, CDMS is the most sensitive dark matter experiment in the world at the moment, but no one knows what the next 6 months will bring.  It's an exciting time in the world of astrophysics.