Particle Physics

Ultralight bosons exist in various proposed extensions to the Standard Model, which can form condensates around rapidly rotating black holes through a process called superradiance. These boson clouds have many interesting observational consequences, such as the continuous emission of monochromatic gravitational waves.  In this talk, I will describe the dynamics of the system when it is part of a binary black hole. I will show that the presence of a binary companion greatly enriches the evolution of the boson clouds, most remarkably through the existence of resonant transitions between growing and decaying modes of the clouds. Finally, I will sketch some phenomenological consequences, both for the gravitational waves emitted by the clouds and the finite-size effects imprinted in the waveforms of the binary signal.

Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors, or MKIDs, are superconducting detector arrays that can measure the energy and arrival time of individual optical through near-IR photons without read noise or dark counts.  I will discuss our recent work and results from the first two MKID Integral Field Spectrographs (IFSs) for high contrast imaging, DARKNESS/SDC at the Palomar 200" and MEC/SCExAO on Subaru. I will then look at the future of MKIDs and their potential on 30-m class telescopes like the TMT, and explore a fascinating new application in the detection of light scalar dark matter. 

I show that dark matter abundance can be set by the decoupling of inelastic scatterings instead of annihilations. Coscattering points to dark matter that is exponentially lighter than the weak scale and has a suppressed annihilation rate, avoiding constraints from indirect detection. The late decays of the states into which dark matter upscatters, can lead to observable distortions to the blackbody spectrum of the cosmic microwave background. 

In the last decades, advances in the level of precision in controlling atomic and optical systems opened up the low-energy precision frontier to fundamental physics tests. Exploitation of quantum entanglement in such systems to further improve the sensitivity of certain existing approaches is currently an active field of research. Drawing from the experiments in our lab, in this talk I will focus on the properties, generation and usage of a particular set of entangled states called spin squeezed states.