Physics Seminar

The Physics Department at BZU held a physics seminar titled: ‘Unconventional  Dark Matter' on 12 January 2011, in which Professor Per Osland from the Institutt for fysikk og teknologi, University of Bergen, Norway, has participated.

Abstract of his lecture:

The talk reviewed some of the evidence for dark matter. Most of the current focus for explaining it is on a version of Supersymmetry, which provides an invisible particle that is absolutely stable, called neutralino. These particles are searched for in experiments where they might scatter (giving a recoiling atomic nucleus) or annihilate pairwise, giving photons or antimatter. One also hopes to produce them at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

However, dark matter need not be absolutely stable, it is sufficient that its lifetime is long compared to the age of the Universe. I will discuss a scenario where unstable dark matter slowly decays, giving off visible (non-dark) particles that one could hope to detect.