Three Paths to Particle Dark Matter
Three Paths to Particle Dark Matter Thesis by Samuel K. Lee In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 2012 (Defended April 16, 2012) ii c 2012 Samuel K. Lee All Rights Reserved iii Some realize the Supreme by meditating, by its aid, on the Self within, others by pure reason, others by right action. Others again, having no direct knowledge but only hearing from others, nevertheless worship, and they, too, if true to the teachings, cross the sea of death. | The Bhagavad Gita (13.25{26) Forgotten rimes, and college themes, Worm-eaten plans, and embryo schemes;{ A mass of heterogeneous matter, A chaos dark, nor land nor water... | An Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley's Study (37{40), Anna Lætitia Barbauld (1825) iv Acknowledgments Astronomy now demands bodily abstraction of its devotee. To see into the beyond requires purity. and the securing it makes him perforce a hermit from his kind. | Mars and Its Canals, Percival Lowell (1906) I first encountered the above words on my recent cross-country emigration from Caltech to Johns Hopkins; they were engraved as an epitaph on Lowell's mausoleum, which is located on the grounds of the observatory bearing the learn'd astronomer's name. Upon reading them, I felt grateful that I could count myself luckier than Lowell in two respects: first, that we can be reasonably sure that dark matter will not follow the canals of Mars into the forgotten annals of science, and, more importantly, that my experience as a scientist thus far was neither as lonely nor as forsaken as Lowell's profound yet depressing words suggest it should have been.
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