Title: Cascade production (dramatically) improves beam dump sensitivities to long-lived particles Abstract: High intensity beam dumps offer some of the strongest constraints on long-lived particles for masses below a few GeV.  Sensitivity projections and exclusion limits are often computed in a conservative “primary only” approximation where only the flux generated by the beam’s primary interactions are included.  In this talk I … Read More

Title: QCD Axion Dark Matter in String Theory Abstract: In this talk, I will attempt to answer the question “If we detect the QCD axion, what will we learn about string theory?” In recent years, we have observed a striking fact in the largest class of explicit compactifications of string theory: they all come with axions, and the properties of … Read More

Title: Dark Matter Annihilation and the Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess Abstract: The Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess has a spectrum, angular distribution, and overall intensity that are in remarkable agreement with that expected from annihilating dark matter particles in the form of a ∼ 50 GeV thermal relic. Alternatively, it has been suggested that this signal might be produced by a … Read More

Title: Novel computational perspectives on matter-wave interferometry Abstract: Matter-wave interferometry holds promise as a powerful quantum sensing technique for fundamental physics. From a theoretical standpoint, it is essential to identify the observables that can be accessed experimentally and compute signatures from phenomena of interest in a tractable and consistent manner. In this talk, I will present two novel approaches that achieve this: … Read More

Title: Dynamical Heating Constraints on Dark Matter Abstract: There is a large and growing interest in observations of small-scale structure in dark matter. We propose a new way to probe dark matter structures in the ~10-10^8 solar mass range. This allows us to constrain the primordial power spectrum from inflation over shorter distances scales than possible with direct observations from … Read More

Title: Gravitational Waves from Gravitational Particle Production Abstract: The excitation of scalar dark matter during inflation may result in large isocurvature perturbations, which can be avoided by inducing a sizable effective dark matter mass during the inflationary phase. This can be achieved by a direct coupling to the inflaton, through a nonminimal coupling to the curvature, or by a large bare mass. … Read More

Title: How to Falsify String Theory at a Collider Abstract: The string landscape accommodates a broad range of possible effective field theories. This poses a challenge for extracting verifiable predictions as well as falsifiable signatures of string theory. Motivated by these considerations, in this work we observe that all known stringy Standard Models support only low-dimensional representations of the gauge … Read More