Speaker
Description
Dark matter provides compelling evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model, motivating a broad landscape of candidates ranging from weakly interacting massive particles to ultralight axions. Astrophysical observations offer a complementary avenue to laboratory experiments for testing dark matter models across a broad range of masses and interaction strengths.
In this talk, I will present novel observational strategies designed to uncover signatures of new physics and highlight the opportunities opened by current and next-generation observatories. I will focus on axions with sub-eV masses, which can decay into near-infrared photons. Using blank-sky observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, I search for the resulting narrow emission line and derive leading constraints on the axion-photon coupling in the eV-scale mass range.
I will also show how cosmic filaments provide a new environment for searching for dark matter, and how different particle processes can produce detectable emission from these structures. Together, these approaches illustrate how previously underexplored astrophysical targets can be transformed into laboratories for hunting new physics.
| Primary Abstract Topic | Theory: Axions and Wave-Like-DM |
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