The astroparticle road to new physics

Imagine living your life in a 5-person household where you don't know the names or faces of your 4 housemates. This is the situation astronomers and particle physicists find themselves in right now with the matter in our own Milky Way Galaxy. Dark matter makes up over 80% of the Milky Way, and the Universe as a whole, but we still don't know what it actually is.

Many theories predict that this mystery is in some way associated with the Higgs boson, the origin of mass, and the existence of an as-yet-undiscovered symmetry about to be unveiled at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). My research aims to uncover the identity of dark matter, and the broader particle theory responsible for it.

Using cutting-edge statistical techniques only developed in the last few years, my research program will combine the results of searches for dark matter and new symmetries from a huge number of different experiments. These range from the LHC to smaller particle colliders, gamma-ray telescopes, cosmic antimatter probes, ultra-clean experiments in the world's deepest mines, and a neutrino telescope embedded in the Antarctic ice at the South Pole. The result will be the first truly comprehensive analysis of theories for dark matter and new physics, painting a much clearer picture of what dark matter is, and what it isn't. Excitingly, this research program may identify many more new, related particles than just dark matter, and give predictions for others to be discovered in the near future. The statistical and computational tools that I develop for this research program will also serve the broader particle and astrophysics communities during and beyond my fellowship, as they will be available as public, open source projects.