This event was recorded on June 26, 2024 at Aspen Center for Physics during the 2024 Heinz R. Pagels Public Lecture Series, in partnership with Aspen Public Radio.
What is the heaviest particle in the Universe? What is the lightest? The answer to these questions could be dark matter. For decades, we have thought that dark matter would be a particle with a mass similar to the particles we already know about, like the proton or the recently discovered Higgs boson. But in the last decade a revolution has taken place in the field, which has led to a dramatic expansion in the range of masses where we believe dark matter could live. In this talk Rodd reviews this revolution, and explains how the discovery of dark matter could amount to detecting dark waves at the location of the Earth, or massive explosions happening throughout the Universe.
About Nicholas Rodd
Nick Rodd is a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory working at the interface of particle physics and astrophysics, who spends his days trying to figure out what dark matter is made of. Nick grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and after receiving his undergraduate degree in law, decided he wanted to do the exact opposite and moved into physics. He moved to MIT in the US for his PhD, which he completed under the supervision of Tracy Slatyer in 2018. His thesis, "Listening to the Universe through Indirect Detection," was recognized with two awards, one as the top thesis in particle physics, and separately as the top in astrophysics. Before moving to LBL, Nick was a faculty member in the CERN theory group in Geneva, where he moved after spending three years at UC Berkeley as a Miller Fellow.