Anapole Dark Matter / The Life and Times of Gary Steigman
Robert (Bob) Scherrer
(Vanderbilt)
In honor of this momentous occasion, I will give two half-hour talks.
For the first half, I will talk about anapole dark matter. There has been a great deal of recent interest in electromagnetically-interacting dark matter, particularly electric and magnetic dipoles. However, the anapole is the only allowed electromagnetic form factor for Majorana particles, and it has not been as extensively investigated. Anapole dark matter has several interesting differences from electric or magnetic dipole dark matter. It annihilates exclusively into fermions via a purely p-wave interaction, and an interaction strength sufficient to account for the present-day dark matter abundance can be made consistent with direct-detection experiments for dark matter masses in the GeV range; this is not the case for the electric or magnetic dipole.
In the second part of my talk, I will discuss Gary Steigman's contributions to cosmology, and place them in their historical and intellectual context. I will also show some funny pictures of Gary.
