Particle Physics

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.

The space-based gravitational wave detector LISA may be able to detect gravitational waves from a first order phase transition at the electroweak scale. Acoustic waves produced during the transition are largely responsible for the resulting signal. I will present results from a large campaign of simulations studying such phase transitions, determining the spectral shape of the gravitational wave power spectrum with unparalleled accuracy. Measuring a cosmological stochastic background could place constraints on the phase transition parameters, such as the nucleation rate and temperature, and therefore provide important information about physics beyond the Standard Model. However, better understanding of the source, as well as the underlying theories of physics beyond the Standard Model, is required before the launch of LISA. I will outline how this understanding can be developed.

I will discuss the calculation of the axion dark matter relic abundance produced by strings and domain walls in the early universe. These objects appear if the global symmetry that the axion is associated with is unbroken at the end of inflation, and in this scenario there is, in principle, a unique prediction for the axion dark matter mass. I will present results from numerical simulations that indicate that the density of strings may be significantly larger than previously thought, leading to a corresponding change in the required axion dark matter mass. I will also discuss the difficulties in computing the energy spectrum of axions produced in the physically relevant regime, and the remaining uncertainties and challenges.

If a component of the dark matter has dissipative interactions, it could collapse to form a thin dark disk in our Galaxy coincident with the baryonic disk. It has been suggested that dark disks could explain a variety of observed phenomena, including periodic comet impacts. Using the first data release from the Gaia mission, we search for a dark disk via its effect on stellar kinematics in the Milky Way. I will present new limits on the presence of a thin dark matter disk, as well as measurements on the matter density in the solar neighborhood.

I will discuss a class of models in which thermal dark matter is lighter than an MeV. If dark matter thermalizes with the Standard Model below the temperature of neutrino-photon decoupling, constraints from measurements of the effective number of neutrino species are alleviated. This framework motivates new experiments in the direct search for sub-MeV thermal dark matter and light force carriers.