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Constraints on Compact Dark Matter (PhD project within the doctoral fellowship program INPhINIT "La Caixa".)

Centro/Institution: 
IFCA (Santander)
Tipo/type: 
Predoctoral
País/Country: 
España
Fecha inicio solicitud: 
Jue, 29/11/2018
Fecha límite solicitud: 
Mié, 06/02/2019

Descripción/Description: 

Compact dark matter is one of the candidates for the elusive dark matter. The range of mass available for this candidate is between the mass of asteroids to masses up to several tens the mass of the Sun. Although the fraction of dark matter that can be in compact form has been constrained to some degree in other studies, and the limits in some mass ranges have been pushed to below 1% (i.e, no more than 1% of the dark matter mass can be in compact form in a particular mass range), there are still windows in which a sizable fraction of the dark matter (more than 10%) can be in compact form. The candidates for this type of dark matter could be primordial black holes but also ultracompact haloes. During this project, the constraints of compact dark matter will be pushed to newer limits through the use of microlensing near caustics, a novel technique pioneered by our group and that allows to prove mass ranges not reachable by other means. The project is multidisciplinar because it will develop novel techniques for numerical simulations (Supercomputers) , provide the tightest constraints in compact dark matter in specific mass ranges (Cosmology), and it will complement the results derived from LIGO (i.e Gravitaional Wave Astronomy)