TPPC weekly seminar (in-person): Hannah Banks - "Echoes from ECOs: Probing Dark Sector Complexity with Atom Interferometers"

Wednesday 18 Oct 2023, 12:30 → 14:00 Europe/London

Strand Building, S7.06

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.