News from the Chair

Dr. Allahverdi
Rouzbeh Allahverdi

Professor Allahverdi Co-Organized and Chaired "Beyond the WIMP Paradigm" Mini-Workshop

  1. Should a traditional Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) be still considered the standard paradigm for Dark Matter in the universe?
  2. How hot was the early universe and what is the most plausible value of its maximum temperature?
  3. Can the physics responsible for generating matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe be probed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)?

Fundamental questions like these were discussed at "Exploring the Energy Ladder of the Universe" workshop that was held on 30 May-10 June, 2016 at Mainz Institute for Theoretical Physics in Johanes Gutenberg University in Germany. The workshop gathered 28 particle physicists and cosmologists from the US, Europe, and Asia who discussed the existence of new energy scales in the early universe and the extent to which they can be considered established or on the verge of being excluded by the latest observational and experimental data.

The scientific program also hosted a mini-workshop on "Beyond the WIMP Paradigm" that was organized by Professors Pasquale Di Bari and Steve King from University of Southampton in UK, and Professor Rouzbeh Allahverdi (who also chaired it) from UNM. This mini-workshop included a number of talks and extended discussions on various alternatives to the standard WIMP paradigm for Dark Matter. This topic is a major focus of current research by Professor Allahverdi and his Ph.D. students Bradley Knockel and Jacek Osinski. Intense activities during the event led to the start of new collaborations across the continents also involving UNM.