2025-04-15
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
MB537
Details
Date: Tuesday, 15 April, 2025
Time:11-12 pm
Venue: MB537
Speaker: Dr. Gonzalo Herrera
Topic:Dark Matter and Cosmic Neutrino Background Detection from Black Hole Environments
Abstract
The detection of particle dark matter and/or the cosmic neutrino background would constitute a major milestone in astroparticle physics. I argue that the vicinity of supermassive black holes is an excellent environment for this purpose. First, I discuss a new method to observationally infer the dark matter density profile in the vicinity of supermassive black holes at distant Galaxies using reverberation mapping measurements. Second, I will discuss that dark matter in these environments can scatter off cosmic rays, neutrinos and gamma-rays, inducing a suppression of the expected fluxes on Earth. For currently unconstrained regions of the parameter space of particle dark matter, this suppression can be significant. Third, I will discuss that the scattering of cosmic rays with the cosmic neutrino background induces a boosted flux on Earth that may be detectable with far future high-energy neutrino telescopes. Current neutrino telescopes already allow us to place strong bounds on neutrino overdensities, which are world-leading at the physical scales of Galaxies and clusters of Galaxies.
Speaker
Gonzalo is originally from Spain, completed his PhD at the Technical University of Munich in 2023. Since then he has been a postdoc at the Center for Neutrino Physics in Virginia Tech. In September this year he will become a Neutrino Theory Network Fellow with a joint appointment at MIT and Harvard. His research interests mainly cover particle dark matter, neutrinos, and astro-particle physics.
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