Talks

I will discuss the cosmology of galileon models with a Minkowski limit and discuss whether they can account for the currently observed cosmological model. The full galileon model predicts the speed of gravitational waves to be different from that of photons. I will discuss this and compare with observations. I will then discuss a subdominant galileon model which is compatible. Finally I will discuss the shape dependence of screening in galileon models, showing that the fifth force is unscreened for planar objects.

I will begin by giving an overview of the current state of exoplanet
science, a field that has advanced tremendously in just the last few
years.  While specialized instrumentation and observational facilities
have provided the data driving this advance, the development and
application of statistical techniques to interpret this data have been
of critical importance.  These same tools are also at the core of all
data-driven science, and are thus applicable to many other fields of
astrophysics that will be acquiring increasingly large and rich
datasets in the coming years.  I will highlight a few examples of
particular interest to fundamental physics, including gravitational
wave observations, fast radio bursts, and cosmological surveys.

Understanding the microscopic nature of dark matter (DM) is one of the most outstanding problems facing modern physics.  There is to-date no evidence for non-gravitational interactions of DM with the rest of the Standard Model and also no hint for any particular DM mass.  My talk with focus on new techniques to search for GeV-TeV scale weakly-interacting DM by looking for DM annihilating in the cosmos into cosmic rays such as gamma-rays and neutrinos. These potential signs of new physics are easily confused with standard but poorly understood astrophysical backgrounds, such as populations of dim point sources (PSs) like millisecond pulsars.  I will present new methods to characterize Galactic and extra-Galactic PS populations, which have complicated DM searches in these regions.  I will show that accounting for unresolved PSs in Fermi gamma ray data leads both to new constraints on the dark sector along with some unexpected surprises.  I will conclude by briefly describing a new idea for a laboratory experiment able to probe ultra-light axion DM, with masses some 20 orders of magnitude smaller than the weak scale.