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High Energy Physics Seminar - Marcell Howard (University of Pittsburgh) "Gravitational Particle Production as a Mechanism for Generating Dark Matter"

Speaker: Marcell Howard (University of Pittsburgh)
Date: 9/12/2025
Time: 11 a.m.
Location: Rhondale Tso Seminar Room, Loomis 236
Event Contact: Brandy Koebbe
bkoebbe@illinois.edu
Sponsor: Physics Department
Event Type: Seminar/Symposium
 

The lack of direct detections for weakly interacting massive particles has led theorists to think about more exotic scenarios for producing DM in the early Universe. One viable alternative is gravitational particle production i.e. the creation of particles through due to the presence of a sufficiently strong gravitational field. In this talk, I will go over how this mechanism can be used to produce a viable free scalar field dark matter candidate and how these results can be extended to a self-interacting scalar field.