Dr Annapaola De Cosa - "Hunting Dark Matter in a Hidden Valley"

Wednesday 19 Mar 2025, 13:30 → 14:30 Europe/London

610 (G.O. Jones Building)

About the speaker:  Annapaola graduated at the University of Naples with a thesis on the search for a heavy Higgs boson in two leptons and two quarks final states (2013).

Since her graduation she focused her activities on the search for new physics involving Vector Like Quarks and Weakly Interacting Particles (Dark Matter candidates) as postdoc at the University of Zurich.

She was then granted an Ambizione fellowship to lead a project on the search for dark quarks at the University of Zurich and in 2020 she had been appointed Assistant Professor at the ETH Zurich. With her group she is  working to tackle a large suit of unconventional dark matter signatures that have been overlooked over the years, spanning from data analysis, to phenomenology and Machine Learning techniques developments, beside detector related work. Recently they proposed new models predicting dark quarks signatures not yet explored, and are performing data analyses trying to catch signs of this kind of new physics. At the same time they are developing new tools for the identification of anomalous jets from new physics exploiting machine learning techniques. Her interests extend to future colliders. I am currently working on feasibility studies for FCC-ee and on the development on new algorithms for the identification of s, c and b- originated quarks. She recently jointed the BSM (Beyond Standard Model)  PPG (Physics Preparatory Group) of the European Physics Strategy. Her research is completed by involvement in the CMS Pixel detector operations and monitoring. She is convener of the CMS Tracker Monitoring group. 

1 Hunting Dark Matter in a Hidden Valley

The search for DM has taken an interesting twist in the last years, abandoning main stream strategies and aiming at new theoretical and experimental paths to unveil Dark Matter nature. In this seminar I will present the latest LHC CMS results in the search for dark quarks appearing in collider detectors as partially visible jets of particles (Semivisible jets) and how developments are moving from this first result to enlarge the explorative territory. From new models, and experimental signatures to novel analysis techniques, I will discuss  new discover possibilities and how we can design model-agnostic searches using Autoencoders.