Come along to R22 Pickavance Lecture Theatre or join online to hear from Professor Henrique Araujo, Imperial College London, on the subject of dark matter and neutrino physics.

Nature continues to torment us with several well-posed and important questions which we have collectively failed to answer over several decades.

• What is the composition of the elusive “dark matter” that accounts for most of the mass of the cosmos?
• And why is the sub-dominant fraction of ordinary matter itself composed of particles rather than antiparticles?

These fundamental questions may be answered by “listening in” to a large collection of very quiet atoms at the core of extremely sensitive radiation detectors installed deep underground.

Prof. Araujo will describe how the new observatory, the XLZD Observatory, will address these important topics by searching for the scattering of dark matter particles in a large liquid xenon detector, and by searching for the neutrinoless double-beta decay of X3-136 nuclei – another process with profound implications for fundamental physics. He will review the scientific motivation for the new observatory and describe its planned physics reach, and how our large international collaboration is planning to implement this ambitious experiment. He will also set out the vision of the team to host the experiment in a newly developed Boulby Underground Laboratory, a unique opportunity for the UK to host a global scientific experiment.

If you are interested in attending either online or in person, please get in touch below to express your interest.