Paleo-detectors are a proposed experimental technique in which one would search for traces of recoiling nuclei in ancient minerals. Natural minerals on Earth are as old as $\mathcal{O}(1)\,$Gyr and, in many minerals, the damage tracks left by recoiling nuclei are also preserved for time scales long compared to $1\,$Gyr once created. Thus, even reading out relatively small target samples of...
DAMIC (for Dark Matter In CCD) seeks for DM interaction in thick fully depleted CCDs. Thanks to the precise energy estimation, the granularity and the very low noise of these detectors, DAMIC is sensitive to low mass WIMP (below 10GeV/c^2) through nuclear recoil but also to hidden sector model through interaction of DM particles with electrons. DAMIC at Snolab, a version of DAMIC experiment...
The DarkSide experiment is designed for the direct detection of WIMPs by means of a double phase liquid argon TPC, inserted inside a double system of active vetoes. The current detector, DarkSide-50, is running with a 50 kg fiducial mass underground argon fill.
The results of DarkSide-50 will be discussed before presenting the larger 20 tonnes project, DarkSide-20k.
The EDGES low-band experiment has measured an absorption feature in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), corresponding to the 21 cm hyperfine transition of hydrogen at redshift z simeq 17, before the era of cosmic reionization. The amplitude of this absorption is connected to the ratio of singlet and triplet hyperfine states in the hydrogen gas, which can be parametrized by a spin...
In electroweak baryogenesis the baryon asymmetry of the universe is created during a first-order electroweak phase transtion. The scenario requires new physics at the electroweak scale, in particular an extended Higgs sector and new sources of CP violation, which can be tested experimentally. It would be advantageous if the crucial aspects of the various models can be tested in a single...
Many string compactifications predict the existence of a scalar field (modulus) with a mass of 100-10000 TeV. In the early universe its decay (at MeV-temperatures) generates large amounts of entropy and washes out any previously produced baryon asymmetry. I describe how the baryon asymmetry can be (re)generated by the modulus decay. The mechanism relates the smallness of the asymmetry to the...
We study the spectrum of gravitational waves produced by a first order phase transition in a hidden sector that is colder than the visible sector. In this scenario, bubbles of the hidden sector vacuum can be nucleated through either thermal fluctuations or quantum tunnelling. If a cold hidden sector undergoes a thermally induced transition, the amplitude of the gravitational wave signal...
