Publications

Dark matter substructure under the electron scattering lamppost

Graduate student Jatan Buch, postdocs Manuel Buen-Abad and John (Shing-Chau) Leung, and Prof. Fan study the mutual relationship between dark matter-electron scattering experiments and possible new dark matter substructure nearby hinted by the data from Gaia satellite. In particular, they show how future data could probe and constrain the fraction of dark matter in substructure, even when it constitutes a subdominant component of the local dark matter density.

Galactic origin of relativistic bosons and XENON1T excess

Motivated by a possible excess in the low-energy electronic recoil data reported by XENON1T collaboration, Graduate student Jatan Buch, postdocs Manuel Buen-Abad and John (Shing-Chau) Leung, and Prof. Fan explore the exotic possibility that dark matter decays or annihilations taking place in our galaxy may produce a flux of relativistic very weakly-coupled bosons, axions or dark photons. They show that there exist several generic upper bounds for this flux on Earth assuming generic minimal requirements for DM, which will survive even if XENON1T excess doesn’t stay.

Could the 2.6M⊙ object in GW190814 be a primordial black hole?

In June 2020 the LIGO-Virgo collaboration announced the discovery of a strange gravitational wave merger event. It was a merger between a black hole 23 times the mass of the Sun, and a compact object with mass approximately 2.5 times the mass of the Sun. Graduate students Kyriakos Vattis and Isabelle Goldstein working with BTPC/CFPU affiliated faculty member Prof. Koushiappas investigated the possibility of the light object being a primordial black hole, that is a black hole formed right after the big bang.

Deep learning the astrometric signature of dark matter substructure

In an exploratory study, graduate students Kyriakos Vattis and Michael Toomey, together with Prof. Koushiappas (BTPC/CFPU affiliated faculty member) explored whether convolutional neural networks can be used to extract the astrometric signature of dark matter.

CMB constraints on late-universe decaying dark matter as a solution to the H0 tension

Graduate student Kyriakos Vattis together with BTPC postdoc Steven Clark and Prof. Koushiappas (BTPC/CFPU affiliated faculty member) explored the cosmological effects of dark matter that decays to light particles in recent times in the context of the solving the Hubble tension.