University of Pennsylvania
Department of Physics and Astronomy
High Energy Physics Seminar

Abstract

One of the key issues at the frontier between particle physics and cosmology is the nature of non-baryonic dark matter, most probably in the form of weakly interacting supersymmetric particles, which apparently dominate the matter density of the Universe. The PICASSO project at the Universite de Montreal is one of several on-going initiatives to directly search for non-baryonic dark matter candidates distributed in the galactic halo. In this talk we will review the present status of dark matter searches and discuss in particular first results from PICASSO and the future potential of the superheated droplet technique for dark matter detection.