Event time:
Thursday, October 15, 2020 - 2:30pm
Speaker:
Katelin Schutz, Ph.D.
Speaker Institution:
MIT Center for Theoretical Physics
Talk Title:
Making dark matter out of light: the cosmology of sub-MeV freeze-in
Event description:
Dark matter could be a “thermal-ish” relic of freeze-in, where the dark matter is produced by extremely feeble interactions with Standard Model particles dominantly at low temperatures. In this talk, I will discuss how sub-MeV dark matter can be made through freeze-in, accounting for a dominant channel where the dark matter gets produced by the decay of plasmons (photons that have an in-medium mass in the primordial plasma of our Universe). I will also explain how the resulting non-thermal dark matter velocity distribution can impact cosmological observables, including the CMB, the Lyman-alpha forest, and the cosmological 21 cm signal.
Location:
Via Zoom