Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

The field of dark matter study has reported a number of anomalies in recent years, and the upcoming generation of experiments hopes to directly detect particles from the local halo population through scattering off nuclei in underground detectors. In this context, it has become particularly important to understand and quantify the information content of the data sets they will produce. In this talk, I will discuss the impact of uncertainties regarding both the astrophysics of dark matter and the phenomenology of the scattering processes on the interpretation of the forthcoming data. I will demonstrate the importance of combining data sets from multiple experiments with different target materials and recoil-energy windows in order to distinguish a range of underlying models for dark-matter-nucleon interactions and recover key particle properties of dark matter.