Exploring dark-matter candidates with continuous gravitational waves

Abstract:

The third observing run of advanced LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA brought unprecedented sensitivity towards a variety of quasi-monochromatic, persistent gravitational-wave signals. Continuous waves allow us to probe not just the canonical asymmetrically rotating neutron stars, but also different forms of dark matter, thus showing the wide-ranging astrophysical implications of using a relatively simple signal model. In this talk, I will summarize recent results from searches for dark matter in the form of asteroid-mass primordial black holes, dark matter clouds that could form around rotating black holes, and even dark matter that could interact with the detectors themselves.


Speaker: 
Dr. Andrew Miller, the National Institute of Subatomic Physics (Nikhef) and Utrecht University, Netherlands
Place: 
Shu Qi meeting room
Time: 
Tuesday, October 17, 2023 - 1:30PM to Tuesday, October 17, 2023 - 2:30PM
Biography: 
Andrew Miller received his PhD from the University of Florida, in US, and the Sapienza University of Rome, in Italy, for a thesis on using machine learning to detect transient gravitational waves from remnants of neutron star mergers. He did his first postdoc at the Université catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, and is now a postdoc at the National Institute of Subatomic Physics (Nikhef) and Utrecht University, in the Netherlands, where he works on new probes of dark matter, primordial black holes and neutron stars, as well as on machine learning techniques to mitigate noise disturbances in the LIGO/Virgo data.