Events at Director’s Conference Room (50A-5132)

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Title: Not–quite–primordial black holesAbstract: In this talk, I will discuss a new mechanism for the formation of seeds of supermassive black holes at early cosmic epochs. Enhanced density fluctuations with amplitudes that are not large enough to form primordial black holes post-inflation can still lead to collapsed dark matter halos at very early times. For halos forming prior to 1+z ~ 200, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) … Read More

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Title: On the Run from the Dark Side of the Muon Abstract: In a high-energy muon collider, the beam emits collinear particles that act as partons within the muon with parton distribution functions. I will present a method to search for new physics by exploiting deviations in Standard Model parton distribution functions due to modifying their scale evolution. One can simply select … Read More

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Talk title: Higher Axions Abstract: A large fraction of the experimental efforts searching for the (QCD) axion focus on smaller-scale, time-intensive, resonant searches. These searches would greatly benefit from a precise estimate of the axion mass. In theory, the axion mass can be inferred from the observed dark matter abundance and numerical simulations point towards an axion mass (slightly) higher … Read More

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Title: Mapping the string axiverse Abstract: Considerable progress has recently been made in understanding the string axiverse in Calabi–Yau compactifications. In this talk I discuss how this axiverse elucidates the quantum gravity prior on axion effective theories and advocate for a modular approach which organizes axiverse statistics around topology. This is illustrated through a study of fuzzy axion dark matter, … Read More

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Title: Electroweak Symmetry Restoration at High Energies Abstract: With the milestone discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC, detailed study of its properties becomes a high priority for collider physics. After a brief overview of the properties of the longitudinal gauge bosons and the Higgs boson, we revisit the Goldstone boson equivalence theorem and define the “electroweak symmetry restoration” (EWSR) … Read More