Educational
Frascati, March 27 – 31 , 2023
From Quarks to Black Holes: let’s get INSPYRED!
Dark Matter: Modern quintessence of the universe – P. Gianotti (INFN-LNF)
Ancient Greek scholars believed that in nature there were 4 elements, the “fifth element” the ether was, according to Aristotle, the constituent of the celestial bodies.
Today we know that the matter that makes up the stars is the same we are made of, but the idea of something other than “ordinary” matter has not faded away. This is because we have discovered that this represents only 5% of what is present in the cosmos.
The idea that dark matter exists to explain the gravitational phenomena we observe in the universe dates back to the 1930s. In almost a century of experimental activity we learned a lot about what dark matter is not. A priori, all the theories able of explaining the phenomena we observe could be good, but in general those which, in addition to accounting for dark matter, are able to explain some phenomena that are not clear in our Standard Model are considered more reliable.
The seminar will retrace the evolution of the idea of dark matter from a historical point of view arriving to describe the experimental activities in progress to try to explain its nature.
Paola Gianotti
Paola Gianotti is a senior researcher of INFN’s Frascati National Laboratory. Since the beginning of her career, she has been interested in the study of hadronic physics. She started her scientific activity at CERN in Geneva working on various experiments in this scientific field and in 1993 she became staff at the research division of the LNF. She studied hypernuclei at DAFNE with the FINUDA experiment, and in recent years she moved to study dark matter with the PADME experiment.