High Energy Physics Seminar

Despite its 40 years of success, the Standard Model, our most complete theory of the elementary particles that make up the Universe and the forces that govern their interaction, is incomplete. It fails to describe gravity or the extreme variation in particle masses, and it provides no explanation for the existence of the dark matter and dark energy observed throughout our Universe. Physics beyond the Standard Model may be accessible to novel, ultra low-background detectors that operate in deep underground laboratories and push the frontiers of experimental sensitivity. I will discuss the development of two such experiments: the LEGEND experiment, an array of high purity germanium detectors that will search for neutrinoless double-beta decay, and DarkSide-20k, a liquid argon time projection chamber that will search for particle dark matter.