Reserach Statement

Dark matter makes up a large majority of the matter in the universe; despite this, its identity is unknown, and it does not arise from the Standard Model of particle physics. It is therefore a subject of particular interest at the moment, both for the obvious reason that most of the universe being unknown is, to say the least, highly unsatisfactory, and for the slightly less obvious reason that it provides one of the few possible stepping stones to physics beyond the Standard Model. A bare minimum of properties may be inferred from what dark matter has to be and what it cannot be, but that leaves a large space of possible theories. There are several ways of placing constraints on this space, and my focus is on constraints derived from astrophysical phenomena. If the dark matter interacts weakly with standard model particles (as in many of the most well-studied theoretical models), dark matter will accumulate in stars. Depending upon the coupling to standard model, the accumulated dark matter may alter stellar properties and stellar evolution. My recent work was specifically on using numerical computation to obtain limits on dark gauge bosons from supernova cooling constraints. Current and future work explores more general astrophysical constraints on classes of self-interacting dark matter models.

11/2016