Physics Colloquium with Jaynes Fellowship Symposium
The Jaynes Fellowship Symposium will be presented by the inaugural Edwin Thompson Jaynes postdoctoral fellows. Christopher Cappiello, Anastasia Sokolenko, and Ronen Weiss will each deliver ~20 minute talks on their research.
Christopher Cappiello on "Dark Matter Phenomenology: From MeV to Meteors"
The identification of dark matter is one of the most important problems in particle physics and cosmology today. But despite decades of searching, we have yet to determine the particle nature of dark matter. Even its mass is unconstrained across an enormous range--from sub-eV mass particles to asteroid mass black holes. My research uses a combination of astroparticle phenomenology, direct detection, and x-ray/gamma ray astronomy to search for dark matter across a wide range of mass scales. In this talk, I will describe phenomenological searches for three types of dark matter: sub-GeV particles, which are difficult to search for with direct detection; TeV-scale relics which could yield explain an observed excess in galactic 511-keV photons; and composite dark matter candidates much heavier than usually considered by direct and indirect detection searches.
Ronen Weiss on “Universality, short-range physics, and quantum computing”
In this talk I will discuss my research of the quantum many-body problem, with focus on nuclear physics as well as on universal features shared by different systems. I will present my work on short-range physics and on quantum computing algorithms with the goal of advancing our description of such systems.
Anastasia Sokolenko on "Constraining light dark photons with Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies"
The presence of light dark photons in the intergalactic medium can significantly affect observable cosmic structures, particularly through resonant photon-dark photon conversion, which amplifies anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This talk explores the influence of light dark photons on the CMB temperature anisotropy power spectrum. Utilizing state-of-the-art cosmological simulations and the full Planck dataset, our study investigates how dark photon interactions impact the CMB, imposing constraints on the mixing parameter for these hypothetical particles.
This lecture was made possible by the William C. Ferguson Fund