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Katelin Schutz | |
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Nationality | American |
Education | Ph.D. Berkeley, B.S. MIT |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions | MIT, McGill |
Thesis | Searching for the invisible: how dark forces shape our Universe (2019) |
Doctoral advisor | Hitoshi Murayama |
Other academic advisors | |
Website | https://katelinschutz.com/ |
Katelin Schutz is an American particle physicist known for using cosmological observations to study dark sectors, that is new particles and forces that interact weakly with the visible world. She was a NASA Einstein Fellow [1] and Pappalardo Fellow [2] in the MIT Department of Physics and is currently an assistant professor of physics at McGill University. [3]
The American Physical Society awarded her the Sakurai Dissertation Award in theoretical particle physics in 2020, citing the highly original contributions from her PhD work. [4]
Schutz grew up in rural western New York in the Finger Lakes region. In 2010, she graduated from Allendale Columbia School. [5]
Schutz attended MIT, where she did research with Max Tegmark, [6] David Kaiser, [7] and Tracy Slatyer. [8] She was awarded a Hertz Fellowship and NSF Fellowship in 2014. [9] She did her PhD with Hitoshi Murayama at UC Berkeley. [4] She completed her thesis in 2019, titled "Searching for the invisible: how dark forces shape our Universe." [10]
Schutz joined McGill University in Montreal as an assistant professor in August 2021 as part of the Centre for High Energy Physics and in the McGill Space Institute. [11]
Schutz studies extensions to the Standard Model of particle physics known as dark matter that might interact only weakly or indirectly with familiar matter made of quarks and leptons. For example, her research asks whether such dark matter particles might experience new forces outside of the Standard Model, and how we might detect such interactions. In particular, such particles would interact with standard matter via gravity, and such interactions may provide a "gravitational portal between dark and visible matter" that we can observe via astronomy, e.g. stars and galaxies, including nearby dwarf galaxies and the Milky Way itself, and also large-scale cosmological structures, such as the CMB, the Lyman-alpha forest, and the cosmological 21 cm line. [12] Schutz and colleagues have pointed out that if dark matter consists of particles that are far lighter than electrons, then particles in the Standard Model could create dark matter through feeble interactions at low temperature known as freeze-in. [13] [14] [15] [16] She has also studied strongly interacting massive particles as a dark matter candidate. [17]
Her research has also identified mechanisms for directly detecting dark matter particles through a two-excitation process in superfluid helium [18] [19] as well as for detecting primordial black holes using pulsar timing. [20]
She and her colleagues also simulate galactic halos, [21] and have used data from Gaia to observationally constrained the existence of a dark matter disk in the Milky Way. [22] [23]
As a graduate student, Schutz was a NSF Fellow [9] and Hertz Foundation Fellow. [24] She was named a 2019 Rising Star in physics by the Stanford and MIT Departments of Physics. [25] In 2020 she was the first woman to receive the American Physical Society Sakurai Dissertation Award in theoretical particle physics. [26]
In condensed matter physics, a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) is a state of matter that is typically formed when a gas of bosons at very low densities is cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero. Under such conditions, a large fraction of bosons occupy the lowest quantum state, at which microscopic quantum-mechanical phenomena, particularly wavefunction interference, become apparent macroscopically. More generally, condensation refers to the appearance of macroscopic occupation of one or several states: for example, in BCS theory, a superconductor is a condensate of Cooper pairs. As such, condensation can be associated with phase transition, and the macroscopic occupation of the state is the order parameter.
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are hypothetical particles that are one of the proposed candidates for dark matter.
In physics, quintessence is a hypothetical form of dark energy, more precisely a scalar field, postulated as an explanation of the observation of an accelerating rate of expansion of the universe. The first example of this scenario was proposed by Ratra and Peebles (1988) and Wetterich (1988). The concept was expanded to more general types of time-varying dark energy, and the term "quintessence" was first introduced in a 1998 paper by Robert R. Caldwell, Rahul Dave and Paul Steinhardt. It has been proposed by some physicists to be a fifth fundamental force. Quintessence differs from the cosmological constant explanation of dark energy in that it is dynamic; that is, it changes over time, unlike the cosmological constant which, by definition, does not change. Quintessence can be either attractive or repulsive depending on the ratio of its kinetic and potential energy. Those working with this postulate believe that quintessence became repulsive about ten billion years ago, about 3.5 billion years after the Big Bang.
An axion is a hypothetical elementary particle originally postulated by the Peccei–Quinn theory in 1977 to resolve the strong CP problem in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). If axions exist and have low mass within a specific range, they are of interest as a possible component of cold dark matter.
A strongly interacting massive particle (SIMP) is a hypothetical particle that interacts strongly between themselves and weakly with ordinary matter, but could form the inferred dark matter despite this.
Roberto Daniele Peccei was a theoretical particle physicist whose principal interests lay in the area of electroweak interactions and in the interface between particle physics and physical cosmology. He was most known for formulating the Peccei–Quinn theory, which attempts to resolve the strong CP problem in particle physics.
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Ann Elizabeth Nelson was a particle physicist and professor of physics in the Particle Theory Group at the University of Washington from 1994 until her death. Nelson received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004, and she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2012. She was a recipient of the 2018 J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics, presented annually by the American Physical Society and considered one of the most prestigious prizes in physics.
Christopher T. Hill is an American theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory who did undergraduate work in physics at M.I.T., and graduate work at Caltech. Hill's Ph.D. thesis, "Higgs Scalars and the Nonleptonic Weak Interactions" (1977) contains one of the first detailed discussions of the two-Higgs-doublet model and its impact upon weak interactions. His work mainly focuses on new physics that can be probed in laboratory experiments or cosmology.
Katherine Freese is a theoretical astrophysicist. She is currently a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she holds the Jeff and Gail Kodosky Endowed Chair in Physics. She is known for her work in theoretical cosmology at the interface of particle physics and astrophysics.
In particle physics, hexaquarks, alternatively known as sexaquarks, are a large family of hypothetical particles, each particle consisting of six quarks or antiquarks of any flavours. Six constituent quarks in any of several combinations could yield a colour charge of zero; for example a hexaquark might contain either six quarks, resembling two baryons bound together, or three quarks and three antiquarks. Once formed, dibaryons are predicted to be fairly stable by the standards of particle physics.
The chameleon is a hypothetical scalar particle that couples to matter more weakly than gravity, postulated as a dark energy candidate. Due to a non-linear self-interaction, it has a variable effective mass which is an increasing function of the ambient energy density—as a result, the range of the force mediated by the particle is predicted to be very small in regions of high density but much larger in low-density intergalactic regions: out in the cosmos chameleon models permit a range of up to several thousand parsecs. As a result of this variable mass, the hypothetical fifth force mediated by the chameleon is able to evade current constraints on equivalence principle violation derived from terrestrial experiments even if it couples to matter with a strength equal or greater than that of gravity. Although this property would allow the chameleon to drive the currently observed acceleration of the universe's expansion, it also makes it very difficult to test for experimentally.
Light dark matter, in astronomy and cosmology, are dark matter weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS) candidates with masses less than 1 GeV. These particles are heavier than warm dark matter and hot dark matter, but are lighter than the traditional forms of cold dark matter, such as Massive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs). The Lee-Weinberg bound limits the mass of the favored dark matter candidate, WIMPs, that interact via the weak interaction to GeV. This bound arises as follows. The lower the mass of WIMPs is, the lower the annihilation cross section, which is of the order , where m is the WIMP mass and M the mass of the Z-boson. This means that low mass WIMPs, which would be abundantly produced in the early universe, freeze out much earlier and thus at a higher temperature, than higher mass WIMPs. This leads to a higher relic WIMP density. If the mass is lower than GeV the WIMP relic density would overclose the universe.
In astrophysics and cosmology scalar field dark matter is a classical, minimally coupled, scalar field postulated to account for the inferred dark matter.
Fuzzy cold dark matter is a hypothetical form of cold dark matter proposed to solve the cuspy halo problem. It would consist of extremely light scalar particles with masses on the order of eV; so a Compton wavelength on the order of 1 light year. Fuzzy cold dark matter halos in dwarf galaxies would manifest wave behavior on astrophysical scales, and the cusps would be avoided through the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The wave behavior leads to interference patterns, spherical soliton cores in dark matter halo centers, and cylindrical soliton-like cores in dark matter cosmic web filaments.
Kathryn M. Zurek is an American physicist and professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology. Her research interests primarily lie at the intersection of particle physics with cosmology and particle astrophysics. She is known for her theories on dark matter's "hidden valleys", also known as hidden sectors.
Céline Bœhm is a professor of Particle Physics at the University of Sydney. She works on astroparticle physics and dark matter.
The Buchalter Cosmology Prize, established in 2014, is a prestigious annual prize bestowed by Dr. Ari Buchalter.
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Daniel S. Akerib is an American particle physicist and astrophysicist. He was elected in 2008 a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).
Katelin Schutz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dark Sectors in High-Redshift Observations
KATELIN SCHUTZ '10 After graduating this spring from MIT, Katelin has continued on to UC Berkeley for a Ph.D. in cosmological phenomenology. For her undergraduate work, she earned four prestigious awards: a Hertz Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Fellowship, an Apker Award, and a Fellowship from UC Berkeley.