advisory board chair message

The Centre also featured heavily in the media during 2022, with the road trip and other activities, but the key impact came from the official celebration of the completion of Stage 1 of the construction of the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory. The Centre received wide national and international press coverage featuring broad representation of researchers.

Steady progress has been made on the existing research of the Centre, with ongoing projects and new research activities both in theory and experiments.

The SABRE South researchers and institutions recognise the critical importance of SABRE and have been working to coordinate the activities required to complete and install the experiment in SUPL. SABRE will lay essential groundwork and capabilities here in Australia for a new generation of novel underground experiments as well as a rich training environment for future research leaders.

The ORGAN experiment also completed its first comprehensive search for axion dark matter. Results ruling out dark matter in a specific mass range, but improvements to the detectors will achieve greater sensitivity and wider future searches.

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics has enjoyed a year of collaboration and engagement in 2022. This year has provided opportunities for Centre members to meet in person, travel overseas, strengthen their relationships and seed new collaborations.

A highlight for me was the Centre’s first in-person annual workshop in Geelong in November, aptly titled “Forging and Strengthening Collaboration”. I was fortunate to be able to attend part of it in person and walking into the workshop dinner the energy in the room was evident. Speaking with Centre members emphasised the importance of interacting in person rather than virtually. The Advisory Board also had the opportunity to hold our first face-toface meeting, with five Advisory Board members in attendance at the workshop.

It was another big year for outreach and education, with a strong focus on developing long-term relationships with regional and remote schools. Building on a successful road trip in 2021, the National Quantum and Dark Matter Road Trip, run in collaboration with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems, saw Centre researchers share their passion for physics with high school students across the country and through numerous public events.

The Centre’s theorists and experimentalists have worked together to build on our understanding of dark matter. New avenues and ideas to look for dark matter have been developed. The annual workshop featured sessions on theoretical and experimental convergence as well as theory discussion sessions that provided opportunities for new cross node research collaborations.

There is a real sense of excitement for the future of the Centre, and 2023 is already looking to be a year of world class research, increased collaboration and many opportunities for mentoring and training.

Aidan Byrne

www. centredarkmatter.org

@ARC_DMPP

@CDMPP.org

ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics

@arc_cdmpp