March 11th @ 4PM in Science A Rm. 475

HSU PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY PRESENTS
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ILLUMINATING THE NATURE OF DARK MATTER WITH MAGNETIC RESONANCE EXPERIMENTS WITH PROF. DEREK F. JACKSON KIMBALL, CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY - EAST BAY

Over 80% of the mass in the universe is made up of an invisible substance known as dark matter. Evidence of dark matter's gravitational pull on stars and galaxies has been found by a wide variety of astrophysical observations. But what exactly is dark matter? This is a complete mystery. There are a number of hypotheses that are being tested by experiments throughout the world. Cal State East Bay is part of two different international collaborations to test if dark matter might be made of particles known as axions.

In the Cosmic Axion Spin Precession Experiment (CASPEr), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques are being used to search for oscillating dipole interactions induced by an axion dark matter field. The Global Network of Optical Magnetometers to search for Exotic physics (GNOME) is a worldwide array of atomic magnetometers that searches for transient signals generated if the Earth passes through an invisible axion "wall" or "star." We will report on initial results from both experiments.