Department Colloquium | New Ideas in Dark Matter Detection

The nature of the dark matter remains one of the most compelling outstanding questions in physics. Theoretical and experimental focus has been directed in the last several decades on New Physics at the weak scale, including the search for dark matter as a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP). We are now looking beyond the WIMP window towards light hidden sectors, and new ideas to search for dark matter must be found. I describe some of these new ideas, including collective excitations in polar materials and superfluid helium, as well as low-gap targets like Dirac semimetals.