Conveners
Thursday plenary session: Galactic centers and dark matter: Block 1
- Ye-Fei Yuan (University of Science and Technology of China)
Thursday plenary session: Galactic centers and dark matter: Block 2
- Ye-Fei Yuan (University of Science and Technology of China)
More than a century ago, Albert Einstein presented his general theory of gravitation. One of the predictions of this theory is that not only particles and objects with mass, but also the quanta of light, photons, are tied to the curvature of space-time, and thus to gravity. There must be a critical mass density, above which photons cannot escape. These are black holes. It took fifty years...
The nature of dark matter (DM) is one of the most relevant questions in modern astrophysics. I will present a brief overview of recent results that inquire into a possible fermionic quantum nature of the DM particles, focusing mainly on the interconnection between the microphysics of the neutral fermions and the macrophysical structure of galactic halos. I will show how such an interconnection...
In the early 1960s, as X-ray Astronomy was beginning to take shape, the critical role of X-ray polarimetry became apparent. By 2001, significant progress had been made, demonstrating the effective use of the photoelectric effect in gas as a breakthrough technique in Astrophysics. It wasn't until 2021 that an observatory with the required sensitivity utilizing the photoelectric effect could be...
Located at the China Jinping Underground Laboratory, the PandaX experiment employs xenon as a target to detect rare physics signals, such as dark matter and neutrinos. The PandaX-4T, the latest generation detector featuring a 4-ton xenon target volume, commenced data collection in 2020. One of our objectives is to unravel the nature of dark matter by investigating various potential signatures....
IceCube is a cubic kilometer neutrino observatory at the geographic South Pole whose sensitivity from PeV down to GeV, or MeV using a special DAQ, has spawned a diverse scientific program. It discovered and continues to characterize the astrophysical neutrino flux, recently identifying a galactic component. To resolve it further, IceCube has found a 4.2σ excess from the direction of NGC 1068...
The intersection of General Relativity and geodesy represents a new frontier in Earth sciences. A major task of geodesy is to determine the gravity field of the Earth, e.g. to monitor mass variations. Due to recent advancements in high precision clock comparison, General Relativity introduced an entirely new measurement concept to geodesy based on the gravitational redshift. We present the...
In our quest towards a theory of gravity beyond General Relativity black holes with their strong gravitational fields represent an important testing ground. Among the numerous alternative theories of gravity much work in recent years has focused on a set of scalar-tensor theories, where the scalar field couples to higher curvature terms. The properties of the resulting black holes in such...
The huge luminosity, the redshift distribution extending at least up to z~10 and the association with the explosive death of very massive stars make long GRBs extremely powerful probes for investigating the early Universe (pop-III stars, cosmic reionization, SFR and metallicity evolution up to the “cosmic dawn”) and measuring cosmological parameters. At the same time, GRBs are expected to be...
