Yale Postdoctoral Trainees

The intense flux of neutrinos produced at the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) make it an ideal location to pursue studies of low energy neutrino-nucleus interactions. The COHERENT experiment has deployed a suite of detectors to the SNS to measure coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS), a standard model process predicted more than forty years ago but only recently observed. CEvNS plays an important role in the evolution of a supernova, is a background for WIMP searches, and has potential applications for monitoring reactor neutrinos.

UltraLight Dark Matter (ULDM) is an axion-like dark matter candidate with an extremely small particle mass. The dynamics of ULDM are governed by the Schrodinger-Poisson system of coupled differential equations for which the ground state solution is a spherically symmetric soliton. While a purely solitonic profile is incompatible with observational constraints on dark matter halos, mergers of ULDM solitons create halos with solitonic central cores, but with NFW-like behaviour at large radii.

The Hydrogen Intensity Real-time Analysis eXperiment (HIRAX) is a 21cm radio telescope array to be deployed in South Africa. It will consist of 1024 six meter parabolic dishes, and will map much of the southern sky over the course of four years. HIRAX is designed to improve constraints on the dark energy equation of state through measurements of large scale structure at high redshift, and will additionally monitor transients such as fast radio bursts (FRBs) and pulars, as is currently done with CHIME in the Northern Hemisphere.

The physics program of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) has brought a unique insight into the hot and dense QCD matter created in such collisions, the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Jet quenching, a collection of medium-induced modifications of the jets’ internal structure that occur through their development in dense QCD matter, has a unique potential to assess the time structure of the produced medium.

The Standard Model of particle physics provides a remarkably predictive and well-tested theory for describing the interactions of the known elementary particles. However, the observed matter/antimatter asymmetry, the existence of small neutrino masses, and cosmological constraints on dark matter and dark energy point strongly to the existence of fundamental physics beyond the Standard Model. In the past few decades, ultra-low-background liquid xenon time projection chambers (TPCs) have emerged as a powerful experimental technique in the search for low energy signatures of new physics.