Josephine Swann

Abstract:

During the spring semester of last academic year and over this summer, I worked on doing background calculations for a speculative search for dark matter with Dr. Matthew Bellis. The search is based on a model that suggests dark matter could be trapped inside the Earth and could annihilate with itself, mix with standard model particles, and create muons, which could be detected by experiments like the CMS detector at CERN. Other processes could create these muons, so my work focused on calculating the expected number of muons we would see from “normal” physics processes. Now that we have an estimate (2 muons per year, which is essentially zero background), we will begin looking at and doing simulations with real muon data from the CMS detector.