Astrophysics

Ghostly neutrino particles continue to bring surprises to fundamental physics, from their existence to the phenomenon of neutrino oscillation which implies that their masses are nonzero. Their exact masses, among the most curious unknowns beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, can soon be probed by the joint analysis of upcoming cosmological surveys including LSST, Euclid, WFIRST, Simons Observatory, and CMB-S4. In this talk, I will first discuss ongoing work studying the effects of massive neutrinos. I will then turn the focus to my major efforts of modeling the challenging nonlinear regime of cosmic structures (<10 Mpc) where neutrino effects are the strongest. Finally, I will draw a roadmap to pin down the neutrino mass over the next decade.

Albert Einstein predicted a century ago the existence of gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of spacetime moving at the speed of light. It was believed that these ripples were so faint that no experiment would ever be precise enough to detect them. But in September 2015, LIGO did exactly that. The teams working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in Louisiana and Washington measured a loud gravitational wave signal as it traveled through the Earth after a billion-year journey from the violent merger of two black holes.

Since that first detection, scientists have measured many more gravitational waves, including a signal produced by colliding neutron stars captured by LIGO and the Virgo detector in Europe in 2017. That cataclysm also generated electromagnetic waves – light – detected by numerous other telescopes, and helped scientists understand how gold is created in deep space.

In a special public lecture webcast at Perimeter Institute on October 23, 2019, Gabriela González will provide a first-hand account of LIGO’s century-in-the-making breakthrough, and explain observations made as recently as this year. González, a professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University and former spokesperson of the LIGO collaboration, will take the audience on a journey to some of the universe’s most violent places, and explain how such distant events can lead to a very bright future here on Earth.

A massive U(1)' gauge boson known as a “dark photon” or A', has long been proposed as a potential explanation for the muon g − 2 anomaly. Recently, experimental results have excluded this possibility for a dark photon decaying visibly and invisibly. I revisit this idea and consider a model where A' couples to inelastic dark matter, leading to a semi-visible decay mode. I show that for large mass splittings between the dark sector states this decay mode is enhanced, weakening the invisibly decaying dark photon bounds. As a consequence, A' resolves the g −2 anomaly in a region of parameter space the thermal dark matter component of the Universe is readily explained.