1-semester student seminar on topics in particle astrophysics. Theme this year: particle physics perspective on dark matter.
A list of papers will be distributed towards the start of the semester. Students can select a paper from the list, or propose their own choice of paper for their seminar presentation.
We will discuss: how to build a particle physics model of dark matter? what are the observational constraints? what main types of models have been proposed in the literature, and what are their key characteristics, points of beauty, and/or shortcomings? What does all this have to do with supersymmetry, and the weak scale hierarchy problem? What are the theoretical consequences of results from direct and indirect attempts to detect dark matter, w.r.t. theories of weak-scale beyond-the-Standard Model physics, and other theories such as models of the QCD axion?