what's the point of direct-detection experiments?

In the morning I spoke with Ana Bonaca (Harvard) and Chris Ick (NYU) about their projects. Bonaca is looking at multipole expansions of the Milky Way potential from an information-theory (what can we know?) point of view. We are working out how to visualize and test her output. Ick is performing Bayesian inference on a quasi-periodic model for Solar flares. He needs to figure out how to take his output and make a reliable claim about a flare being quasi-periodic (or not).

Rouven Essig (Stonybrook) gave a nice Physics Colloquium about direct detection of dark matter. He is developing strong limits on dark matter that might interact with leptons. The nice thing is that such a detection would be just as important for the light sector (new physics) as for the dark sector. He gave a good overview of the direct-detection methods. After the talk, we discussed the challenge of deciding what to do as non-detections roll in. This is not unlike the issues facing accelerator physics and cosmology: If the model is just what we currently think, then all we are doing is adding precision. The nice thing about cosmology experiments is that even if we don't find new cosmological physics, we usually discover and measure all sorts of other things. Not so true with direct-detection experiments.