Colloquium, Saarik Kalia (IFAE, Barcelona), "Exploring the Uncharted Waters of Wavelike Dark Matter"

Thursday 18 Dec 2025, 10:00 → 11:00 Europe/Vienna

Besprechungsraum 3A.1/2 (PSK)

The nature of dark matter remains one of the biggest mysteries of fundamental physics.  A vast sea of possibilities exist for its underlying properties, like its mass and its couplings.  While heavy dark matter parameter space has been well explored, much of the ultralight regime remains uncharted waters.  Dark matter in this regime behaves like classical waves rather than particles, so unique detection strategies are needed.  In this talk, we will set sail to new regions of ultralight dark matter parameter space.  Particularly, we will focus on the extremely low-mass regime, which experiments have yet to explore.  Just as a sailor uses a compass, we will utilize precision magnetic-field measurements to navigate this parameter space.  I will show how geomagnetic field data from the SuperMAG collaboration have set the first direct constraints in this regime, and I will describe ongoing efforts by the SNIPE Hunt collaboration to collect more data.  I will also demonstrate that state-of-the-art magnetically levitated (Maglev) systems can act as strong probes for several models of ultralight dark matter.  Finally, I will discuss recent work motivating regions of self-interacting scalar dark matter parameter space.