CCAPP Seminar - Agnieszka Cieplak (UCSD) "Constraining Primordial Black Hole Dark Matter using Microlensing"

December 4, 2012
All Day
1080 PRB

Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) remain a Dark Matter (DM) candidate of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. I will present a new method to potentially constrain up to 40% of the remaining PBH DM mass range using microlensing of Kepler source stars. The combination of exceptional photometric precision of the Kepler mission and the increase in cross section due to the large angular sizes of the nearby Kepler stars, allows for the possibility of extending the theoretically detectable PBH DM mass range two orders of magnitude below current limits. I will address how to extract the DM properties such as mass and spatial distribution if PBH microlensing events were detected, and present a new formalism for calculating microlensing rates in the presence of large finite-source limb-darkening effects, correcting a well-known finite-source limb-darkening microlensing formula. Finally, I will present an approximation for estimating the predicted rate of detection for a given star, which will be used for future missions, closing with a preliminary look at the Kepler lightcurve data.

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