Gravity seminar - Clare Burrage Seminar

Attempts to explain the current acceleration of the expansion of the Universe typically introduce new scalar degrees of freedom that we call dark energy.  Detecting dark energy and understanding its properties is therefore a vital part of understanding how to resolve the cosmological constant problem.  In this talk I will discuss  the way that dark energy scalar fields interact with Standard Model particles and the phenomenological consequences, with the goal of finding a way to detect dark energy in the laboratory.