How did iDMEu come to be and what are its goals?
Context
Understanding dark matter, how it was produced in the early universe, what its nature is and where it is located in the cosmos is one of the fundamental physics problems of our century.
The community working on dark matter is active and diverse, including particle physics theorists, cosmologists and astrophysicists with a wide range of interests, as well as particle physics experimentalists focusing on collider, fixed-target, beam-dump, direct and indirect DM detection experiments, as well as dedicated axion/ALP experiments.
Given the diversity of the dark matter community, discovering or constraining dark matter requires broad discussions.
Origin
At the JENAS workshop held in Orsay (France) in October 2019, jointly organized by ECFA (the European Committee for Future Accelerators), NuPECC (the Nuclear Physics European Collaboration Committee) and APPEC (the Astroparticle Physics European Consortium), a call for Expressions of Interest was launched, inviting projects with interest spanning the high energy physics, astroparticle physics and nuclear physics community.
A small number of colleagues working on DM (the iDMEu proponents) decided to submit such a Letter of Intent, and collected endorsements from the community.
Our goals
iDMEu enables to exploit synergies and to highlight the complementarity of different dark matter communities by:
- developing a common platform to facilitate (and participate in) new cross-community scientific collaborations
- collecting dark matter resources in an online meta-repository
- helping communicate a common dark matter story for different audiences.
Concretely, that means:
- Organizing regular 'town-hall' meetings, with a focus on: 1) the challenges faced by each community and the way ahead, 2) the cross-communication among the communities.
- Creating a meta-repository of DM resources (this website).
For more information you can reach the organizers at iDMEu-jenaa-eoi-organizers[at]cern.ch.