Dr. Priscilla Cushman

There's a lot of it there.

We know a lot about it from gravity.

But what we don't know is how it interacts with standard model particles, the stuff we know and love.

And because we know the mass density,

We know that if it was one of these WIMPs, then we should have seen it already.

The fact that it's taken us so long to find it tells us that

There seems to be less of one kind.

I don't know if this makes sense, but to me, it really does open this drawer, which might be Pandora's box, actually, of a lot of multiple candidates, perhaps.

Maybe it's a whole new dark sector with a family of shadow particles.

It might even lead us to a new way to understand gravity.

So in all of it, I feel encouraged in one sense.

We're looking in a whole new parameter space where the lighter dark matter particles exist or would exist.

And we might find several.

And it could also not be a particle.

Indeed, it could be a wave.

And there are a number of experiments that are looking for axions or axion-like particles.

Particles that fulfill all of the limitations from cosmology and the relic densities we see, but come about it a different way.

Well, I think it does in a sense.

There's two motivations for me, for example.

I think with all the evidence pointing to the fact that dark matter points up 85% of the stuff in the universe.