High Energy Physics Seminar

I describe bosonic (scalar dark matter, electromagnetic and gravitational) wave mixing in curved spacetime using novel gravitational wave effective field theory techniques.  Curved spacetime adds a new length scale, the Schwarzschild radius, which significantly alters the oscillation probabilities in comparison to the standard flat spacetime computations.  The curved spacetime effects are analogous to the Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein (MSW) effect for neutrinos and are frozen-in," as the bosonic wave propagates away from the compact object.  Although I will consider axions and axion-like particles (ALPs), our computations are model-independent and applicable to any bosonic dark matter candidate.  In particular, I describe how the mixing often occurs via the energy-momentum tensor, instead of the phenomenological couplings such as the axion-photon coupling.  Time permitting, I describe the associated oscillation probabilities and discuss some of the observational consequences of the mixing, including the energy and polarization of the exiting electromagnetic and gravitational waves.

The talk is in 469 Lauritsen.

Contact theoryinfo@caltech.edu for Zoom link.