Conveners
BSM with Compact Objects 2
- Nirmal Raj (TRIUMF)
Dark matter can deposit energy in neutron stars and heat them to temperatures that could be detectable by upcoming infrared telescopes like James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). These observations have a potential to complement and outperform terrestrial direct detection in a large range of dark matter masses. Electrons are also present in neutron stars in significant proportion. Capture due to...
The paradigm of neutral naturalness suggests the existence of highly non-minimal hidden sectors. In particular, the Mirror Twin Higgs model postulates that some of dark matter is in the form of mirror matter, featuring mirror quarks, leptons and gauge bosons whose masses are a few times heavier than their Standard Model counterparts. I will discuss the possibility that mirror matter could have...
Unusual masses of the black holes being discovered by gravitational wave experiments pose fundamental questions about the origin of these black holes. Black holes with masses smaller than the Chandrasekhar limit $\approx1.4\,M_\odot$ are essentially impossible to produce through stellar evolution. We propose a new channel for production of low mass black holes: stellar objects catastrophically...
Dissipative dark matter models, a relatively new solution to the dark matter problem, have been suggested to form black holes with a novel mass spectrum in an analogous way to Population III star formation. We present here our efforts to verify this analytic prediction using an "atomic" dark matter model, with microphysics that we have extended into the molecular regime, and utilized, as part...
We introduce PySiUltraLight, a modification of the PyUltraLight code -- which models the dynamical evolution of ultralight axion-like scalar dark matter fields -- now with self-interaction terms. Using a particle mass of $10^{-22} \mathrm{eV}/\mathrm{c}^2$, we show that PySiUltraLight to produces collapsing solitons, spatially oscillating solitons, and exploding solitons which prior analytic...
Nontrivial quantum arrangements of matter, such as Schrodinger cat-like states, are sensitive to decoherence from their environment. However, matter that interacts only gravitationally is weakly coupled to its environment, and thus may exhibit slower rates of decoherence. Since dark matter (DM) may only interact via gravity, we explore the decoherence rate of a...
