PJC: Nico Benincasa "Phase transitions and gravitational waves in models of dark matter"
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Europe/Rome
Description
The discovery of gravitational waves in 2015 spectacularly confirmed the robustness of General Relativity. It opened a new channel to investigate dark matter, an unknown matter made of exotic particles, which constitutes 85%
of the matter content in the Universe. Possible first-order cosmic phase transitions happening in the early Universe may have left a gravitational-wave imprint that could be detected today. Our current theory, the Standard Model of particle physics, does not predict such a phase transition, but a smooth crossover that does not generate such signals. For models of dark matter which have a first-order phase transition instead, searching for the gravitational-wave signal is a new way to probe dark matter. In this talk, I present the results of the study of different dark matter models, predicting a gravitational-wave signal that could be detected via future space-based gravitational-wave detectors such as LISA, DECIGO or BBO. Detecting such a signal could elucidate the nature of dark matter.
