Physics Dissertation Defense: Kimmy Cushman, Yale University, “Stealth Dark Matter with Lattice Field Theory”

Event time: 
Tuesday, December 12, 2023 - 10:30am to 11:30am
Location: 
Sloane Physics Laboratory (SPL), Room 56 See map
217 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

Dark matter dominates the matter content of the Universe, but its composition remains a mystery. Here, we investigate a strongly interacting SU(4) gauge theory called stealth dark matter, which is analogous to QCD in that it produces a spectrum of composite particles whose mass is generated by the strong dynamics. The lightest mass baryon of stealth dark matter is the dark matter candidate, which may naturally exhibit a self-interaction that could be compared to astrophysical constraints. This work constitutes the first milestone in the research program to calculate stealth dark matter self-interactions with lattice field theory. We present the first LapH smearing, irrep projected results of the SU(4) stealth dark matter baryon spectrum, and present the first results of the odd-parity baryon spectrum. For three points in the stealth dark matter parameter space, at three different choices of degenerate quark masses, we resolved the even-parity baryon ordering with greater precision and reduced systematic error compared to previous work.
Thesis committee: George Fleming (advisor), David Poland (official advisor), Priya Natarajan, Keith Baker