Speaker: Hannah Banks
Title: Echoes from ECOs: Probing Dark Sector Complexity with Atom Interferometers
Abstract: Long-baseline atom interferometers offer an exciting opportunity to explore mid-frequency gravitational waves in the near future. In this talk I will survey the landscape of possible contributions to the total ‘gravitational wave background’ within this frequency band, finding that the inspirals of known populations of stellar-mass compact binaries cumulatively produce a signal well within reach of the proposed AION-km and AEDGE experiments. Not only will this form a relevant background to searches for other sources of GW at these experiments, but is an interesting signal in its own right with much to reveal about the Universe. I will further show that hypothetical populations of dark sector exotic compact objects such as fermion and boson stars could generate signatures unique to mid- and low-frequency gravitational wave detectors, providing a novel means to probe complexity in the dark sector.