Speaker
Yu-Dai Tsai
(University of California, Irvine)
Description
I will discuss the cosmic relic background of millicharged particles—hypothetical particles with electric charges much smaller than the electron’s—that may have been produced in the early universe and left an irreducible relic today. I will explain how experimental searches for these particles can provide novel probes of reheating cosmology, the poorly constrained epoch immediately after inflation that determines the temperature and particle content of the primordial universe. Finally, I will touch on a fundamental mathematical issue in millicharge phenomenology related to the theoretical consistency of fractional charges and their embedding within gauge theories and cosmological models.
Author
Yu-Dai Tsai
(University of California, Irvine)