1. Home
  2. Departmental Colloquium -The Search for Dark Matter and Resolving the DAMA Conundrum

Departmental Colloquium -The Search for Dark Matter and Resolving the DAMA Conundrum

Date

Friday November 7, 2025
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm

Location

STI A
Event Category
Colloquia
Departmental
Reina Maruyama,
Yale University
 

 

Abstract

Astrophysical observations give overwhelming evidence for the existence of dark matter. Physicists from all over the world are mounting experiments to look for a variety of dark matter candidates that include WIMPs, axions, and their cousins, with no conclusive detection yet.   There was one anomaly: a clear and persistent annual modulation observed in the data from DAMA/NaI and DAMA/LIBRA experiments.  Since the late ‘90s, the DAMA collaboration has insisted that the annual modulation in their data is evidence for detection of dark matter, and there have been many speculations about the source of the modulation.   I will summarize the status of the field, the ongoing work with COSINE-100, and discuss our most recent publication together with the ANAIS-112 experiment that addresses this question (PRL 135 121002, (2025)) in which we reject dark matter as the reason for DAMA’s observed modulation.   
 

Timbits, coffee, tea will be served in STI A before the colloquium.