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September 26, 2025 past

PUG Seminar

Whitmore 321

PUG Seminar

Abstract: Since LIGO's first detection a decade ago, gravitational waves have pioneered new frontiers in physics and astronomy. In addition to these contributions, gravitational wave observations are also poised to explore the nature of dark matter beyond the CDM regime. In particular, dissipative dark matter halos can fragment and cool to form black hole binaries whose mergers emit gravitational waves. In this talk, I will discuss how gravitational wave observations constrain dark sector microphysics.

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2025-09-26 14:30 Joel Cortez Osuna Probing Dissipative Dark Matter with Gravitational Waves
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.