Galactic Archaeology and the Search for Dark Matter

ABSTRACT
The Gaia mission is in the process of mapping nearly 1% of the Milky Way’s stars, nearly a billion in total. This data set is unprecedented and provides a unique view into the formation history of our Galaxy and its associated dark matter halo. I will review recent results demonstrating how the evolution of the Galaxy can be deciphered from the stellar remnants of massive satellite galaxies that merged with the Milky Way early on. This analysis is an inherently "big data" problem, and I will discuss how to leverage machine learning techniques to advance our understanding of the Galaxy's evolution. Our results indicate that the local dark matter is not in equilibrium, as typically assumed, and instead exhibits distinctive dynamics tied to the disruption of satellite galaxies. The updated dark matter map built from the Gaia data has ramifications for direct detection experiments, which search for the interactions of these particles in terrestrial targets.

BIO
Mariangela Lisanti is an Associate Professor at Princeton University. She earned her Ph.D. at Stanford University, and she was an associate research scholar at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Sciences. Her research activity spans from the phenomenology of collider physics to models of dark matter and their experimental signatures.

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Q&A