Gustavo Marques Tavares (Stanford University) “Detecting dark matter from Supernovae”
abstract: The central region of Supernovae are one of the hottest and densest regions in the Universe. Due to the high temperatures, particles with sub-GeV masses can be copiously produced if they have non-negligible couplings to the Standard Model. If dark matter has sub-GeV mass it will be produced in the hot Supernovae core and it will have sufficiently large … Read More
Stefano Profumo (UCSC) “Three dark matter stories”
ABSTRACT: I will report on three areas of my research work on dark matter: indirect searches with gamma rays, primordial black holes as dark matter candidates and/or as dark matter generators, and dark matter kinetic re-coupling.
Paul Riggins (UCB) “Constraining ultralight scalars with neutron star superradiance”
Ryan Janish (UCB) “White Dwarfs as Dark Matter Detectors”
Dark matter that is capable of sufficiently heating a local region in a white dwarf will trigger runaway fusion and ignite a type 1a supernova. We consider dark matter (DM) candidates that heat through the production of high-energy standard model (SM) particles, and show that such particles will efficiently thermalize the white dwarf medium and ignite supernovae. Based on the … Read More
Rachel Houtz (IFT, Madrid), “Color Unified Dynamical Axion”
We consider an enlarged colour sector which solves the strong CP problem via new massless fermions. The spontaneous breaking of a unified colour group into QCD and another confining group provides a source of naturally large axion mass $m_a$ due to small size instantons. This extra source of axion mass respects automatically the alignment of the vacuum, ensuring a low-energy … Read More
Labor Day (no seminar)
Zhengkang Zhang (UC Berkeley) “Reshaping effective field theory analyses: new challenges at the LHC and new tools for one-loop matching”
Abstract: The lack of new physics discoveries has not only motivated increasing use of effective field theory (EFT) techniques to connect beyond Standard Model ideas and experiment, but also pushed us to think harder about how to interpret data and perform calculations within the EFT framework. As a result, progress has been made in at least two aspects: limitations and … Read More
Anders Andreassen (UC Berkeley) “JUNIPR: a Framework for Unsupervised Machine Learning in Particle Physics”
Abstract: In applications of machine learning to particle physics, a persistent challenge is how to go beyond discrimination to learn about the underlying physics. In this talk, we will present a new framework: JUNIPR, âJets from UNsupervised Interpretable PRobabilistic modelsâ, which uses unsupervised learning to learn the intricate high-dimensional contours of the data upon which it is trained, without reference … Read More
Miguel Zumalacarregui (UC Berkeley & IPhT Saclay) “The Dark Universe in the Gravitational Wave Era”
Abstract: Evidence shows that we live in a universe where 95% of the matter and energy is of unknown nature. Right from the onset, Gravitational Wave (GW) astronomy is shaping our understanding of the dark universe in several ways: GW signals of black hole mergers have resurrected the idea of Dark Matter being made of primordial black holes, while multi-messenger … Read More
John Terning (UC Davis) “Resolving the Weinberg Paradox with Topology”
Long ago Weinberg showed, from first principles, that the amplitude for a single photon exchange between an electric current and a magnetic current violates Lorentz invariance. The obvious conclusion at the time was that monopoles were not allowed in quantum field theory. Since the discovery of topological monopoles there has thus been a paradox. On the one hand, topological monopoles … Read More