Description:

Understanding the particle model(s) of dark matter is a major endeavor in particle physics and cosmology, and in recent years many thermal relic candidates are being constrained by experimental data. I will discuss three new ways to shed light on one minimal hypothesis: dark matter is a particle with very small electric charge, and was produced through freeze-in by rare interactions in the early universe. I will describe the journey of this dark matter particle, from its creation through plasma effects in the first minutes, through the time of recombination when dark matter free-streaming and DM-baryon scattering affect large scale structure and the CMB, and finally a peek into the future when such a dark matter particle could scatter off a phonon in proposed polar semiconductor experiments.

Seminar Speaker: Tongyan Lin, UCSD

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, HEP