GAMBIT: Towards a Global And Modular Beyond-the-Standard-Model Inference Tool (15w5115)

The Casa Matemática Oaxaca (CMO) will host the "GAMBIT: Towards a Global And Modular Beyond-the-Standard-Model Inference Tool (HALF)" workshop from September 27th to October 2nd, 2015.

Imagine living in a house where you don't even know the names or faces of your four housemates. This is where astronomers and particle physicists find themselves right now with the matter in our own Milky Way Galaxy. Dark matter makes up over 80% of the Milky Way, and the Universe as a whole, but we still don't know what it actually is. Many theories predict that this mystery is somehow related to the Higgs boson, the origin of mass, and some as-yet-uncovered symmetry about to be discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

A group of twenty particle physicists, astronomers, statisticians and computational scientists is meeting at the Banff International Research Station to create the computational tools of the future in the search for dark matter, and the broader particle theory it belongs to. Using cutting-edge statistical and computational techniques only developed in the last few years, their plan is to combine the results of searches for dark matter and new symmetries from a huge number of different experiments. These range from the LHC to smaller particle colliders, gamma-ray telescopes, cosmic antimatter probes, ultra-clean experiments in the world's deepest mines, and a neutrino telescope embedded in the Antarctic ice at the South Pole. The result will be the first truly comprehensive analysis of theories for dark matter and new physics, painting a much clearer picture of what dark matter is, and what it isn't.

The Casa Matemática Oaxaca (CMO) in Mexico, and the Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) in Banff, are collaborative Canada-US-Mexico ventures that provide an environment for creative interaction as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the Mathematical Sciences, with related disciplines and with industry.



The research station in Banff is supported by Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Alberta's Advanced Education and Technology, and Mexico's Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT). The research station in Oaxaca is funded by CONACYT.