Data mining for dark matter

New University of Adelaide Future Fellow Dr Martin White is starting a research project that has the potential to redirect the experiments of thousands of physicists around the world who are trying to identify the nature of dark matter.

Dr White is developing new computational (data mining) techniques that will allow him to analyse an extensive range of particle physics and astrophysics data from global experiments and test the various models of dark matter.

"If you put together everything we know about the Universe, only about 4% is normal matter – the rest is dark matter and dark energy," says Dr White. "Following the discovery of the Higgs Boson two years ago, dark matter remains the biggest problem in fundamental physics.

"Tens of thousands of physicists around the world are working on it. Until we understand the nature of dark matter, we simply can't understand a huge amount of our Universe."

Dr White will be developing a giant software package to take in the massive amounts of data from different experimental sources including from the Large Hadron Collider, in order to test the viability of a wide class of theories.