Tracy Slatyer (MIT)

2:00pm Thursday September 14, 2023
Geoff Opat Seminar Room

Dark Matter, Cosmic Background Radiation, and the Birth of the First Stars

84% of the matter in the universe is “dark”, presently invisible to us except through its gravitational interactions. However, even tiny interactions between dark and visible matter could have striking effects on the primordial history of our universe and leave distinctive traces of their existence in distortions to the spectrum of low-energy background photons. I will present recent work mapping out the space of such signals that could be produced by dark matter decay and annihilation, and furthermore discuss how such energy injections could influence the formation of the first stars in the universe.