Theory Division

Dark matter in cosmic structures is expected to produce signals originated from its particle physics nature, among which the electromagnetic emission represents a relevant opportunity, whose intensity is directly linked to the amount of dark matter in galaxies and clusters. On the other hand, this emission is very faint, thus contributing only at the unresolved... More »

Bound-state formation effects can have a large impact on the dynamics of dark matter freeze-out in the early Universe, in particular, for colored coannihilators. We present a general formalism to include an arbitrary number of excitations of bound states in terms of an effective annihilation cross section. For a coannihilator in the fundamental representation of... More »

Axion Like Particles (ALPs) naturally appear in many BSM theories as pseudo-goldstones bosons of spontaneously broken symmetries. They may couple to both the fermionic and bosonic sectors of the Standard Model, and exist over a wide range of masses spanning from the sub eV to TeV scale. I will review the motivation for Axion-Like Particles... More »

The recent measurement of the anomalous muon magnetic moment by the E989 experiment at Fermilab appears to confirm the existing tension with the Standard Model (SM), previously reported by the Brookhaven experiment. In light of this result, we revisit the contribution of a kinetically mixed dark photon to g-2, which has been excluded in minimal... More »

Motivated by the prospect of discovering stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds, this talk will focus on the role(s) that non-minimally coupled scalar fields can play in the evolution of the early Universe. In the first part I will present a model for gravitational reheating involving a scalar field directly coupled to the Ricci curvature scalar. Crucial... More »

Direct detection experiments for dark matter are increasingly ruling out large parameter space. However, light dark matter models with particle masses < GeV are still largely unconstrained. In this talk, I will present the examination of a proposal to use atom interferometers to detect a light dark matter subcomponent at sub-GeV masses. Dark matter scattering off one “arm” of... More »

Neutrinos are the most mysterious particles in the standard model. Many of their fundamental properties such as their masses, lifetimes, and nature (Dirac or Majorana) are yet to be pinned down by experiments. Currently, the strongest bound on neutrino masses comes from cosmology. This bound is obtained by scrutinizing the gravitational effect of the cosmic... More »

Quantum Computing holds the promise of enabling calculations of the real-time evolution of quantum systems, with a wide range of applications in nuclear and particle physics. In particular, a fault-tolerant Quantum Computer would allow calculations of nuclear dynamics beyond the reach of classical computing. In this talk, I will discuss the problem of calculating real-time... More »

Jets of hadrons produced at high-energy colliders provide experimental access to the dynamics of asymptotically free quarks and gluons and their confinement into hadrons. Motivated by recent developments in conformal field theory, we propose a reformulation of jet substructure as the study of correlation functions of a specific class of light-ray operators and their associated... More »