Talks

Statistical evidence has previously suggested that the Galactic Center GeV Excess (GCE) originates largely from point sources, and not from annihilating dark matter. In this talk, I will discuss the impact of unmodeled source populations on identifying the true origin of the GCE. In a proof-of-principle example with simulated data, I will demonstrate that unmodeled sources in the Fermi Bubbles can lead to a dark matter signal being misattributed to point sources. Furthermore, I will show there is striking behavior consistent with a mismodeling effect in the real Fermi data, finding that large artificial injected dark matter signals are completely misattributed to point sources. Consequently, I will conclude that dark matter may provide a dominant contribution to the GCE after all, and discuss future directions.

It is generally believed that modification of general relativity inevitably introduce extra physical degree(s) of freedom.
In this talk I argue that this is not the case by constructing modified gravity theories with two local physical degrees of freedom. After classifying such theories into two types, I show explicit examples and discuss their cosmology and phenomenology.