Mirrors in space are a dumb idea. Put that aside for a second. I want to talk about math, and how physicists use math. And why you need to be better at using math as part of your thought process. It's going to touch on some AI stuff, and I want to get across why you need to be more mathematically literate even with all these new tools. Because math and sciences are liberal arts, no less than…
This is a paper explainer for my recent work with my graduate student Eric Putney, previous Rutgers postdoc (now at Institute of Basic Science in Korea), and my Rutgers colleague David Shih. This is the culmination of a series of papers, which I’ve written about here. The goal of this paper and the larger project is to use the collective motion of the stars near the Earth, as measured by the Gaia…
Given that it is 2025, the dumbest thing I’ve seen this week is some stiff competition, but “AI datacenters in space” is some impressive idiocy. I’ve seen a few breathless media reports on how AI companies are planning to launch entire datacenters into space. Some of these articles point to a single H100 GPU that was used to train a LLM while in orbit. Obviously, humanity has the capacity to…
This is a paper explainer for my recent paper “General Constraints on Isocurvature from the CMB and Ly-$\alpha$ Forest” by myself, Peizhi Du (Rutgers postdoc until recently, now a newly-minted faculty member in China), Nicolas Fernandez (Rutgers postdoc), and my student Mitchell Weikert. This is in some ways a follow up to our previous paper which I wrote about here That paper had to do with a new…
Today, along with about 230 other academics from New Jersey universities, both public and private, I sent a letter to the Senators of New Jersey (Andy Kim and Cory Booker) about the threats to scientific research and higher education that are occurring within the state and the nation as a whole. You can read that letter here . Academia has been facing problems and issues for a long time. Chief…
This is work that I did with my student, Eric Putney, then-Rutgers-postdoc Sung Hak Lim (now at the Institute for Basic Science in Daejeon), and my colleague David Shih. This is actually a continuation of work we’ve been doing for a while, starting with a paper that tested the idea on synthetic data, and then a later paper applying it to real data. I didn’t write blog posts on those because I fell…
This is a paper I wrote with Tracy Slatyer at MIT, her student Yitian Sun (now a postdoc in McGill), Sidd Mishra-Sharma (previously a postdoc at IAIFI, newly hired as a professor at Boston University), and my student Ed Ramirez. I think it is fair to say Ed did the majority of the analysis and coding on this (quite extensive) project, and was instrumental to the project from beginning to end..…
There is a problem in the early Universe, one that demands an answer. Or maybe there isn’t. But at least, there is something weird going on in the data, and as a theorist, that’s good enough for me. JWST, our newest space telescope, is capable of peering back further into the history of the Universe than previously possible. Sensitive to the infrared (IR) wavelengths, it can see the earliest stars…
I want to tell you about my most recent paper “Dark Radiation Isocurvature from Cosmological Phase Transitions,” which I wrote with my coauthors Mitch Weikert, Peizhi Du, and Nicolas Fernandez. Peizhi and Nico are postdocs here at Rutgers, and Mitch is my grad student. All three are great and fun to work with, and you should hire them. As the title of the paper suggests, this is a project with a…
This is an explainer for my most [recent paper][1], with my Rutgers colleague David Shih, Lina Necib at Caltech, and UCSC grad student (and a Rutgers undergrad alum) John Tamanas. It’s a project that we’ve been working on for a while (some of this being for obvious, 2020-related reasons), and I’m very happy to finally have it see the light of day, as it’s a really interesting convergence of a…
For particle physicists like myself, understanding how a galaxy works is critical for understanding how dark matter works at the particle level. All our evidence for the properties of dark matter, starting with its very existence and going from there, comes from its gravitational imprint on the visible matter. The physics of the very small influences the structure of some the largest objects in…
This is an explainer for my recent paper with David Hogg and Adrian Price-Whelan. This is a very different kind of paper for me, as evidenced by the fact that it is coming out on arXiv’s astro-ph (astrophysics) list and not even cross-listed to hep-ph (high energy phenomenology). In the end, the goal of the research that produced this paper is to learn about dark matter, but this paper by itself…
Well, they can’t all be winners
This is an explainer for my recent paper with Gopolang (Gopi) Mohlabeng and Chris Murphy on the implications of recent surveys of dark matter velocity distributions from the Gaia mission on dark matter direct detection. There are a bunch of moving parts in this paper, as we’re trying to tie together some new directions from astrophysics with a long-standing problem in particle dark matter, so let…
This is an explainer of my recent paper, written with my colleague here at Rutgers David Shih, and David’s graduate student, Pouya Asadi. This is a follow-up in some sense to our previous collaboration, which for various reasons I wasn’t able to write up when it came out earlier this year. This paper concerns itself with the RDRD and RD∗RD∗ anomalies, so I better start off explaining what those…
I'm visiting the University of Oregon's theoretical physics group, and gave a talk on some of my recent work on extracting dark matter particle physics from astrophysical measurements. The field is so broad that you can't cover everything, but hopefully I gave some idea of the potential. Slides are here.
The central thesis of the paper is that there is a huge potential to learn about the properties of dark matter: things like mass, interactions, production, etc using measurements from astronomy. This is not a completely novel idea: we know a great deal about dark matter from astronomy and cosmology (for example: dark matter is "cold" and not "hot"). However, there is an immense opportunity in the…
If you were made of and could "see" dark matter but had no non-gravitational interactions with the Standard Model, what could you learn about Standard Model particle physics from the gravitational imprint of the Standard Model particles on the dark matter?
A few months ago, I wrote a paper with some other physicists at Rutgers: a graduate student Pouya Asadi, postdocs Anthony DiFranzo and Angelo Monteux (now a postdoc at UC Irvine), and my colleague David Shih. We had developed a new technique to sift through data from the two general purpose LHC experiments (ATLAS and CMS) to look for anomalies that could be the sign of new physics. While that…
Last night, I gave a talk to the Rutgers Society of Physics Students, the STAR group, and the Astronomical Society on dark matter: the evidence for it, how we look for it, and some thoughts about how will we be looking for it in the future. Slides are here.