The following description comes from the event organizer.

To date, we do not know what makes up 80% of the matter in the Universe. This mysterious form of matter is known as dark matter, which does not absorb or reflect light, but influences gravity. Scientists know about the existence of dark matter through its imprints on astrophysical and cosmological observations. 

In this talk, Associate Professor Tien-Tien Yu will present the evidence for the existence of dark matter, describe a few of the methods to search for dark matter, and discuss a particularly exciting direction in research using silicon CCDs to search for dark matter.

Tien-Tien Yu is an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Oregon in Eugene, OR. Prior to arriving at UO in 2018, she was a fellow in the CERN Theory Group in Geneva, Switzerland and a postdoctoral associate at the CN Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI. In 2020, she received an NSF CAREER award towards her study of dark matter, and in 2021 was co-awarded the New Horizons Breakthrough Prize for her seminal work on dark matter detection. In 2023, she was selected to serve on the Particle Physics Prioritization Panel (P5), which is a scientific advisory panel tasked with creating a roadmap for the future of particle physics in the USA.