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October 24, 2025 past

PUG Seminar

Whitmore 321

PUG Seminar

Abstract: Many studies exploring how dark matter might leave imprints on compact objects build on the idea that WIMPs may scatter off nuclear matter inside neutron stars, lose energy, and become captured, potentially altering the stars’ properties. In this PUG talk, I will revisit an early calculation by Press and Spergel of the capture rate of dark matter in the Sun, then discuss how it has been adapted and extended for neutron stars.

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2025-10-24 11:00 Viviana Caceres Capture the Dark Matter: From the Sun to Neutron Stars
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.