Department of Physics

Abstract: The previous two decades has experienced an exponential pace in the sensitivity of direct-detection dark matter efforts that attempt to probe our Milky Way's dark matter halo with terrestrial experiments.  The goal of these experiments is to learn the nature of dark matter such that we understand how it was created and any potential new physics.  Long have Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) been a leading candidate of dark matter with particles around the electroweak scale, where our experimental efforts within the XENON collaboration have developed the technology to complete probe these models.  I will discuss the current XENONnT experiment and related measurements, including how my work related to developing new computational and analysis techniques helps advance the science.  I will then talk about where I see future dark matter efforts leading, including work my group is doing as part of Windchime on using quantum sensors for gravitational dark matter detection or probing fuzzy dark matter models.  The entire talk will be biased toward analysis and computational methods since that is the focus of my group.