Weishuang (Linda) Xu, Harvard, "Thermal Dark Sectors in the Early and Late Universe"
12:00–1:00 pm Zoom Room
Weishuang (Linda) Xu, Harvard, "Thermal Dark Sectors in the Early and Late Universe"
One of the puzzles that the newly data-rich fields of cosmology and astrophysics are most advantaged to tackle is the nature of the dark sector. In particular, a dark sector that thermalizes with the SM bath at some epoch has present-day observable properties that are directly tied to early-universe interactions. In this talk I survey some recent work on detecting different types of thermal dark particles by leveraging different cosmological and astrophysical datasets. I discuss the utility of each of these different probes, the implication for particle theories, and prospects for the future.