"Shedding Light on the Dark Universe" with
GABRIELLA SCIOLLA, Assistant Professor of Physics; Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor

Just when we thought we knew almost everything about matter, Nature surprised us: about 80% of the matter in the Universe is made of something different than the elementary particles we are used to. This mysterious form of matter is known as Dark Matter. Astronomers and cosmologists measured how much Dark Matter exists, but many questions remain unanswered: what is Dark Matter made of? How does it interact with normal matter?

In this talk, Gabriella will discuss how particle physicists address these questions by searching for Dark Matter interactions inside extremely sensitive detectors located deep underground. She will focus on a new experimental technique that she and her colleagues are developing at MIT. This technique will allow us to measure the direction of motion of Dark Matter particles, and shed light on the distribution of Dark Matter in our Galaxy.

As a particle physicist, Gabriella Sciolla studies the interactions between elementary particles as well as their cosmological implications.

She received her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Torino (Italy) in 1996 working on the DELPHI collider experiment at CERN (Geneva). She then moved to California to become a Research Associate at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and a member of the BaBar collaboration. In 2000 she came to MIT, where she was a Pappalardo Fellow before joining the faculty in 2003.

Gabriella lives in Lexington with her husband Masahiro and her two children: Sarah (6) and Christopher (7).