Date/Time
Date(s) - 31/10/2007
3:15 pm - 4:15 pm

Title: The Cosmological Formation of Wee Little Things

Speaker: Dr. James Taylor

Institute: University of Waterloo

Location: ABB 102

Description:

Cosmological evidence on the largest scales – from hundreds of Megaparsecs up to the horizon scale- now confirms that most of the energy density in the universe is something other than the normal matter we are used to. One third of this energy density is strongly clustered around visible galaxies, and probably consists a cold, weakly interacting particle. Identifying this ‘dark matter’ is a top priority for both in astrophysics, where it controls large-scale structure formation, and in high-energy physics, where it may help unravel new symmetries beyond the standard model. To positively identify dark matter in terrestrial experiments, however, we need to know its distribution on very small scales – a few parsecs or less. In this talk I will review some of the evidence for dark matter, and describe recent attempts to model its distribution across many
orders of magnitude, from Megaparsecs down to deciparsecs.