Chris Cappiello (U. Washington St Louis)

10:00am Wednesday Aug 13, 2025
Webinar

Producing and Accelerating Light Dark Matter with Supernovae

The high temperatures, densities, and luminosities characteristic of supernova explosions make them powerful particle physics laboratories. For decades, observations of SN 1987A have been used to place constraints on a broad range of physics beyond the Standard Model. In this talk, I will discuss two ways of using supernovae to probe sub-GeV dark matter. First, I will describe how dark matter that interacts dominantly with neutrinos can be produced in supernovae, due to their enormous neutrino density. This allows strong constraints to be set on a type of dark matter model that is difficult to test, due to how weakly neutrinos themselves interact with the rest of the Standard Model. Second, I will show how ambient dark matter surrounding a supernova can be upscattered to high velocity by the ejecta expelled by a supernova, allowing new limits to be set on light dark matter. This effect is particularly sensitive to dark matter cross sections that increase with velocity, and we present our limits in the framework of nonrelativistic effective operators, many of which produce such velocity scaling.