Aspen Winter Conference on Dark Matter, 6-12 Feb 2011

We are organizing a Winter Conference on Dark Matter from February 6 o 12, 2011, at the Aspen Center for Physics, in Aspen, Colorado. If you want to join us for stimulating discussion in this beautiful location, please register before October 31 on the workshop webpage
Here is the description for the conference:
—
It is an exciting time for dark matter. Direct and indirect searches have yielded very interesting
constraints on the nature of dark matter. In addition, tantalizing signals from both space- and ground-based experiments could be interpreted as a signal of dark matter annihilation/decay or interaction. While these results might provide crucial information about the nature of dark matter, the resolution of these claims requires better understanding of the astrophysical and instrumental backgrounds. Improved results from current and upcoming direct and indirect searches will continue to shed light on these puzzles.
The aim of this workshop is to bring together experimentalists and theorists to share knowledge on astrophysical backgrounds, the most recent experimental results, and the latest theoretical work at a time of great opportunity and change in the field of dark matter.

—

Dark Matter in the Sky and Underground

The Pauli Center for Theoretical Studies in Zurich is sponsoring a workshop on “Dark Matter in the Sky and Underground”.

Rationale: A convincing identification of Dark Matter particles can hardly be achieved on the basis of an accelerator-only approach. Fortunately, complementary information can be obtained with astrophysical observations (in particular of anti-matter, gamma-ray and neutrino telescopes), and data from dedicated ‘direct detection’ experiments. This workshop centers on the multidisciplinary aspect of Dark Matter searches, and more specifically on the statistical tools so far developed for the exploration of New Physics with stringent observational constraints arising form accelerator, direct and indirect Dark Matter searches.

More information, programme and participants list can be found on the workshop webpage.

Joshua Tree Under the Milky Way

Timelapse video of the Perseid Meteor Shower and the galactic core of the Milky Way as seen from Joshua Tree National Park.

These were taken between August 12 and August 15, 2010.
Music is Samskeyti by Sigur Ros

(Credit: Joshua Tree Under the Milky Way from Henry Jun Wah Lee on Vimeo.)

ICTP School 2010


This week I had the pleasure to give a cycle of lectures on Dark Matter at the Summer School in Cosmology, organized at ICTP by P. Creminelli (ICTP) , U. Seljak (UC & LBNL Berkeley & Zürich U.), M. Viel (INAF, OATS). ICTP stands for International Center for Theoretical Physics, which was founded in 1964 by Abdus Salam (Nobel Laureate), and whose mission is to foster advanced studies and research, especially in developing countries.

The videos and slides of all lectures are available on the website of the Science Dissemination Unit of ICTP, that has been created “with the broad aim of disseminating ICTP scientific contents and programmes throughout the world, via electronic, digital, satellite and other information and communication tools, to more people than are able to visit the Centre.”

This way, the lectures delivered here become accessible not only to the ~250 students attending the school, but to students all around the planet, which is especially important for students in third world countries.

You can download the videos of the lectures here.

TeV Particle Astrophysics 2010

The TeV Particle Astrophysics conference was held this year at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, and at the Cite Universitaire de Paris. The aim of the conference was to bring together theorists and experimentalists working in the fields of Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology, with a shared interest in physical processes at the TeV energy scale. After decades of theoretical speculation, the exploration of the TeV energy frontier has now in fact begun, with the results provided by ground-based and space-born observatories of gamma-rays (Fermi, HESS, Magic, Veritas, Cangaroo, Milagro), anti-matter (PAMELA, ATIC, HESS and soon AMS-02) and neutrinos (IceCube, Antares), with a large number of ongoing direct Dark Matter search experiments exploiting different detection techniques, and with the TeV particle accelerators Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider. The physics underlying these experiments involves many intertwined problematics, such as the nature of Dark Matter, Physics beyond the Standard Model, the origin of Cosmic Rays and the distribution of Dark and visible matter in the Universe. All talks are available for download at http://irfu.cea.fr/Meetings/TeVPA/ .