Testing Light-axion and LIGO-like Black Hole Predictions for Dark Matter

Abstract

Updated predictions are made and tested for dark matter as light axions, including a filamentary Cosmic Dawn, solitonic Dwarf Galaxies, Nuclear Star Cluster formation and the distinctive lensing effects of our predicted halo granularity. The speaker and his collaborators also set stringent new limits on primordial Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)-like black holes with the serendipitous discovery of individual highly magnified stars at cosmic distances in the Hubble Frontier Fields.

About the speaker

Prof. Thomas Broadhurst received his PhD in Observational Cosmology from Durham University in 1979. He went on to work at Queen Mary University of London, The Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, Johns Hopkins University, the University of California, Berkeley, the European Southern Observatory and Tel Aviv University before joining the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) in Spain in 2010. He is currently the Ikerbasque Research Professor in the Department of Theoretical Physics at UPV/EHU.

Prof. Broadhurst has expertise in most areas of cosmology, including dark matter and lensing, wave dark matter simulations, observational cosmology, graphics processing unit (GPU) optimized computing, Bayesian statistics and astronomical instrumentation. He has pioneered the main gravitational lensing techniques used today, namely weak lensing, cluster lens magnification from background galaxy counts, and multiple image detection in the strong lensing regime for clusters.

Prof. Broadhurst is also a Researcher of Javalambre Physics of the Accelerating Universe Astrophysical Survey (J-PAS) Lensing Program.

About the program

For more information, please refer to the program website at http://iasprogram.ust.hk/particle_theory.