This award will provide participant support for early career scientists and graduate students to participate in the "Dark Matter Silver Jubilee Symposium" at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA on June 19-21, 2012. The symposium will host distinguished speakers in the field of dark matter research providing an overview of the research to date and an outlook for future investigations.
For Broader Impacts, it has a particular focus on early career scientists and graduate students. The workshop will feature a free public lecture on Dark Matter.
The Dark Matter Silver Jubile Symposium The puzzle of what constitutes 95% of the mass of universe has existed since the early discovery by Fritz Zwicky in 1933 that the motions of the galaxies in the Coma Cluster of Galaxies can only be explained if there is much more mass present there can be in the mass of stars or other ordinary material. For many years Vera Rubin and many other astronomers studied the velocities of stars in spiral galaxies and built a very strong case supporting the hypothesis that the dominant fraction of the mass in the universe is in an unknown form which we call dark matter. In the early 1980s a collaboration between the University of South Carolina and the laboratory, now named the Pacific Northwest Lational Laboratory, began operating their ultra-low background detectors underground in the Homestake goldmine. In 1986 the data from these experiments was used to produce the first direct search for dark matter in our galaxy. One very important result was that the data eliminated heavy neutrinos as a candidate for dark matter over a very large range of particle mass. The Silver Jubilee Symposium was held to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the publication of the results of that first experiment. There were lectures that reviewed the past, described the present experiments, and made proposals for the future experimental searches. One important feature of the symposium was the series of theoretical lectures that provided some guidance to experimentalists present. Another valuable feature was the time devoted to bringing key people in the field together to stimulate new ideas for new and more sensitive searches. The Power-Point presentations are available on the symposium website. To view them, use a brouser, go to Dark Matter Silver Jubilee Symposium, select Activities, then select Activities and Presentations. The intellectual merit of Dark Matter experimental and theoretical activities is beyond dispute. Evidence supporting this statement is the large volume of support spent on activities in the field by both the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. Finally, there was one known example of a direct benificial result of the conference. The interaction of theoretical and experimental physicists attending has resulted in serious discussions of a proposal for a direct search for the excitation of nuclei by collisions with dark matter in the halo of our galaxy. A positive result of such an experiment would produce data that would be very difinitive of a real signal. Work on that concept has already begun. The NSF contribution was used to support five graduate students who attended.
