My research focuses on early universe gravitational and particle phenomena and their cosmological signatures.
Previous work includes:
in-depth investigation of primordial black hole (PBH) formation in multifield inflation models (relevant publications: arXiv:2205:04471/PRD:106-063535)
PBH dark matter and gravitational waves (relevant publications: arXiv:2303:02168)
classical gravity: defining the total energy of a patch of spacetime of arbitrary curvature (v1: in matter domination, can be found at: arXiv:1801.02249, v2 - for arbitrary perfect fluid domination-is upcoming)
Recent Highlights: Finding Primordial Black Hole Dark Matter using Mars’ orbit!
Co-authors Tung Tran, Ben Lehmann, and David Kaiser. We demonstrated that given the extraordinary precision of Solar System data which has been collected over decades, we can detect the tiny fluctuations in orbits of our neighboring planet, Mars, caused by the passage of a primordial black hole of asteroid mass. We may be able to use existing data to constrain the allowed masses of PBHs that can make up all of the Dark Matter, and we may even be able to use this idea to detect compact dark objects in our own Solar System! Phys.Rev.D arVix
Check out some cool coverage of this work!
For an accessible introduction to this work, take a look at this video from PBS Spacetime; presented by the outstanding Matt O’Dowd and co-authored by Matt O’Dowd, Matt Caplan, and myself:
Some ongoing projects…
Studying structure formation and
small-scale dark matter structure
from self-interacting primordial
holes from first order phase
phase transitions
An analysis of the effect of spectator
fields on PBH-forming inflationary
models and their fine-tuning
Ongoing work on the detection of
asteroid mass black holes
Studying spectral distortion
constraints in the context of
supermassive black hole seeds
Using advanced lattice simulations
to model gravitational waves
produced during first order phase
transitions
Studying the cosmic neutrino
background and effects of neutrino
decoupling on supermassive
black hole seeds
Higgs inflation and cosmological
implications of a new type
of criticality