Abstract: Particles with masses of order Hubble during inflation create a distinct, oscillatory signal in the squeezed limit of the CMB bispectrum. A host of models have been studied that produce non-Gaussianities in this limit, with a goal of identifying targets for near-future probes of the CMB and large-scale structure. Yet fully leveraging this program, known as “cosmological collider” physics, as … Read More
Abstract: I will present a model of self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) based on the low energy effective theory of supersymmetric QCD. Velocity dependent self interactions are achieved by a s-channel resonance in the non-relativistic limit generated by a mass ratio fixed by the flavor symmetry. The model is also fairly predictive; the dark matter mass would be required to be around … Read More
Abstract: What does a collection of interacting rigid tops have in common with the gauge theories that describe our fundamental theories of nature? The answer is: their Hilbert space! In this talk I will go over a basic exercise in quantum mechanics, which is finding the energies and eigenfunctions of a free rigid top. This alone is of interest in … Read More
We propose a new method to regulate the motion of test masses in GR as the point particle limit of classical field equations. First, we explore the inter-relations between classical field solutions in a background metric and the Hamilton-Jacobi action for geodesic motion. We then show how to directly extract the scattering angle for a point particle from the partial wave expansion for field scattering, by … Read More
Abstract: As requested, I’ll start my talk with a “brief” introduction to myself, and my past and current research interests, and then transition to focusing on one specific project about millicharged DM. The abstract for that second part is: The possibility of having DM (or a fraction of it) charged under a dark U(1) which mixes with the U(1)EM has … Read More
Abstract: Axion dark matter which couples to fermions can act as an effective magnetic field, the “axion wind”, inducing spin precession in condensed matter systems. I will describe a new proposal for axion wind detection using an unusual phase of superfluid helium-3, the homogeneous precession domain (HPD). In the HPD, spins precess coherently over a macroscopic volume even in the … Read More
Constraints on decaying dark matter are extremely strong. However, if one relaxes the condition that a given species of particle makes up all of dark matter, existing searches for decaying dark matter can be converted into searches for other BSM particles which make up only a fraction of the dark matter relic abundance. For many light BSM particles there exists a freeze-in relic … Read More
Abstract: Dark Photon Dark matter and Millicharged particle dark matter are two of the simplest and popular models of dark matter and are looked for in various experiments. Yet, there continue to exist inaccessible regions in interaction and mass parameter space for these models. In this talk I propose a new way to detect the dark electric fields produced by … Read More