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Sunday 5 June 2016

Warsaw Workshop on Non-Standard Dark Matter

For the last few days I've been at the Warsaw Workshop on Non-Standard Dark Matter. It's been very enjoyable! Plenty of interesting ideas, coffee, and social events. Yesterday I gave a short talk, trying to make the case for a dark matter direct detection search for the sidereal modulation signature. The general idea is that, if dark matter has self-interactions, the dark matter wind which strikes the Earth will interact with any Earth-captured dark matter, leading to a non-trivial spatial distribution which terrestrial detectors traverse throughout the day. I share the slides below this post. If nothing else you should click through to see some entertaining magnetohydrodynamic simulation animations!

By the way, as of this writing ATLAS+CMS have recorded about 2+2/fb of data (or 20 diphotons in alternative units):


We're quickly moving toward the position we were by Christmas last year (about 3+3/fb including the CMS $B=0$ data). If the 750 GeV diphoton resonance prevails in the new data we hope to know by the ICHEP on August 3-10. Some authors have taken to calling the would-be particle Ϝ, which is the archaic Greek letter "digamma" -- very fitting! We will see yet if this name becomes lore... I also quite like the following perhaps future update of the PDG from Strumia:





Slides