Particle Physics

Solar neutrinos are an inevitable background to any dark matter direct detection experiment as they closely mimic the signature of dark matter. In this talk, I will discuss the effects of solar neutrinos on the reach of dark matter-electron scattering experiments, with a focus on semiconductor and xenon-based detectors. In addition, I will present the prospects of measuring and understanding the various solar neutrino components using the same detectors, as well as the effects of non-standard neutrino interactions, thus turning solar neutrinos from a background to an interesting signal in their own right.

Superradiant instabilities may create clouds of ultralight bosons around black holes, forming so-called “gravitational atoms.” It was recently shown that the presence of a binary companion can induce resonant transitions between a cloud's bound states. When these transitions backreact on the binary's orbit, they lead to qualitatively distinct signatures in the gravitational waveform that can dominate the overall behavior of the inspiral. In this talk, I will show that the interaction with the companion can also trigger transitions from bound to unbound states of the cloud---a process which I will refer to as ``ionization,'' in analogy with the photoelectric effect in atomic physics. Here, too, there is a type of resonance with a similarly distinct signature, which may ultimately be used to detect any dark ultralight bosons that exist in our universe.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/97300299361?pwd=azhmVTR5VmpPQ1hwbkVHTUsrOGlJZz09

Higgs inflation introduces a large non-minimal coupling between the Ricci scalar and Higgs that makes the cut-off scale well below the Planck scale. In the first part of the talk, we show that unitarity is indeed violated by a resonant production of longitudinal gauge bosons after inflation, calling for UV completion of Higgs inflation. We then show that unitarity is restored after summing over vacuum polarization-type diagrams that are leading-order in the large-N limit. Scattering amplitude develops a pole after the resummation, which we identify as the scalar component of the metric, or the scalaron. This phenomenon can be understood in the language of the non-linear sigma model (NLSM), with the scalaron identified as the sigma-meson that linearizes the NLSM.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/98015814051?pwd=YWdrWTJzbzJkdnFXRUxPWFJnNXVNQT09

The talk will present the status and plans of the search for low mass dark matter using electron counting semiconductor detectors. In this talk I will describe the skipper-CCD technology and the results of the SENSEI experiment using this technology for direct dark matter search. Finally, I will present the ongoing efforts to develop the next generation of experiments using this technology (Oscura).

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/91739887327?pwd=V2ZiajlENjlrY1pyNWN2OFBaTUduZz09

Paleo-Detectors are natural minerals which record damage tracks from nuclear recoils over geological timescales. Minerals commonly found on Earth are as old as a billion years, and modern microscopy techniques may allow to reconstruct damage tracks with nanometer scale spatial resolution. Thus, paleo-detectors would constitute a technique to achieve keV recoil energy threshold with exposures comparable to a kiloton-scale conventional "real-time" detector. In this talk, I will discuss the potential of paleo-detectors for the direct detection of dark matter as well as for detecting low-energy neutrinos as are e.g. emitted by core collapse supernovae or our Sun. Furthermore, the age of the minerals provides the ability to look back across gigayear-timescales, giving paleo detectors the unique ability to probe changes in the cosmic ray rate or the galactic supernova rate over such timescales as well as dark matter substructure Earth might have encountered during its past few trips around our Galaxy.

A generic low-energy prediction of string theory is the existence of a large collection of axions, commonly known as a string axiverse. String axions can be distributed over many orders of magnitude in mass, and are expected to interact with one another through their joint potential. In this talk, I will show how non-linearities in this potential lead to a new type of resonant energy transfer between axions with nearby masses. This resonance generically transfers energy from axions with larger decay constants to those with smaller decay constants, leading to a multitude of signatures. These include enhanced direct detection prospects for a resonant pair comprising even a small subcomponent of dark matter, and boosted small-scale structure if the pair is the majority of DM. Near-future iterations of experiments such as ADMX and DM Radio will be sensitive to this scenario, as will astrophysical probes of DM substructure.

Despite years of research into dark matter, little has been done to explore models which are heavier than most WIMPs and lighter than most primordial black hole models, "blobs".  This parameter space is particularly difficult to probe, due to low number densities and low masses.  This talk will present a new model-independent mechanism that can be used to probe this difficult to reach region of dark matter parameter space.  Blobs form binaries which spin down and merge at high rates in the present and recent past.  The abundance of mergers can produce observable gravitational wave and electromagnetic signals.  I describe some of these unique signals and show how they already constrain parts of blob parameter space.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/98024869740?pwd=eDlPSTB3UzhIcEVYVGNQakRHVUtFQT09

Pulsar magnetospheres admit non-stationary vacuum gaps that are characterized by non-vanishing E•B. These gaps play an important role in plasma production and electromagnetic wave emission and, as I will discuss, are very efficient axion factories. The density of axions produced in a vacuum gap can be several orders of magnitude greater than the ambient dark matter density.  In the strong pulsar magnetic field, a fraction of these axions may convert to photons, giving rise to broadband radio signals. We show that dedicated observations of nearby pulsars with radio telescopes (FAST) and interferometers (SKA) can probe axion-photon couplings that are a few orders of magnitude lower than current astrophysical bounds.

Non-gaussianity of primordial density perturbations can be sensitive to very heavy particles at the inflationary Hubble scale (H < 10^(13) GeV). However, the window of observability is often constrained to masses close to H. In this talk, I will discuss a mechanism (dubbed “chemical potential”) for heavy complex scalar fields that can extend this window to masses as large as 60H. The mechanism utilizes the large kinetic energy of the inflaton to enhance particle production, and can impart observable non-gaussianity, f_NL~ O(0.01-10). In the second part of the talk, I will discuss another mechanism where the distinct signature of a heavy field can be imprinted at the level of the power spectrum by violating scale-invariance. This can be achieved through the onset of classical oscillations of the heavy field during inflation, instead of quantum production. We consider the possibility of observing such a signal in the stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background originating from a first-order phase transition in a hidden sector. The signal can be observably large in the GW map while being completely hidden in the standard curvature perturbations such as those of the CMB.

Sterile neutrinos have been proposed to tackle a number of outstanding questions in physics, including the phenomena of dark matter, neutrino masses and the baryon asymmetry of the Universe. I will review current limits on GeV-, MeV- and keV-scale sterile neutrinos from cosmology and astrophysics. In particular, I will focus on how primordial abundance determinations, Cosmic Microwave Background observations and stellar kinematic inferences from dwarf spheroidal galaxies allow us to set robust constraints across this mass scale. I will then end with a short discussion on how sterile neutrinos could relax cosmological bounds on neutrino masses and what implications this would have for experiments like KATRIN.
 

Finding cosmological models that are consistent with a wide range of observations, including those that indicate a high Hubble constant (the current rate of expansion of space), has proved to be very challenging. In this talk I explore why. Our exploration leads us to fundamental sources of length scales in cosmological models: gravitational collapse time scales and photon electron-scattering mean free paths. We find that scaling down these quantities leaves cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps, and many other cosmological observables, nearly invariant, while boosting up the expansion rate. I then introduce a model that takes advantage of this symmetry to boost up model predictions of the Hubble constant given CMB and other cosmological data. Gravitational collapse time scales are scaled down from standard cosmological values by the introduction of a `mirror world' dark sector, and photon mean free paths are scaled down by reducing the amount of helium, thereby freeing up more electrons. I speculate about alternative ways to reduce photon mean free paths, as consistency with the Riess et al. (2021) measurement of the Hubble constant requires there to be less helium in the universe than is observed. 

Cosmic inflation provides an environment similar to particle colliders that can produce new particles and record the resulting signal. In this talk, I will describe a scenario in which new particles much heavier than the Hubble scale are produced during inflation via couplings to the inflaton. These heavy particles propagate classically and give rise to localized spots on the cosmic microwave background following their production. Momentum conservation during particle production dictates that these localized spots come in pairs. I will discuss the properties of such pairs of CMB spots and the prospect of their detection from the thermal fluctuation background in a position space search.