Seminar/ Colloquium

Title : Neutron Stars as Dark Matter Detectors.
Speaker : Dr. Aniket Joglekar, IIT Tirupati.
Date : 29/09/2022, 05:30 PM , Ramanujan Hall.

Abstract: 

Extreme astrophysical environments provide unique opportunities to probe dark matter across a wide range of masses. Exploring dark matter via observations of heavy compact objects has been a major field of growth in recent years. In this talk, I focus on neutron stars as dark matter detectors. Neutron stars can accelerate the halo dark matter falling into them to relativistic speeds. Deposition of the kinetic energy of the captured dark matter can heat up the neutron stars and in the case of some older neutron stars can enhance the temperature by order of magnitude, which could be potentially detected by infrared telescopes such as the recently launched James Webb Telescope. The presence of ultra relativistic electrons in the neutron star can lead to interesting inferences about leptophilic dark matter models. Additionally, observations of old neutron stars have the potential to constrain the dark matter parameter space due to the absence of its dark matter-induced transmutation into a black hole. I overview these topics and share the results of my recent and upcoming works.

Short-bio:

Dr. Aniket Joglekar is an Assistant Professor at IIT Tirupati. He obtained his Ph.D. from the  University of Chicago and subsequently held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Riverside, and Laboratoire d’Annecy-le-Vieux de Physique Théorique, Annecy France. In 2022, he joined the faculty of IIT Tirupati. His research interests include high energy phenomenology, astroparticle physics, dark matter, and baryogenesis.