Physics

I use precision measurement to look for physics beyond what we know: what dark matter is, and what the universe was doing at its beginning. The probes range from quantum sensors on a benchtop to minerals, pulsars, and the primordial sky.

Stay tuned for more soon on each of the following...

• CASPEr@night: a fully automated axion search that runs on the idle time of NMR facilities, with John Blanchard — night.blanchard-science.com
• meV dark matter: a detailed analysis of dark matter detection in the meV mass range, building on ideas from my past projects — GALILEO and the Rydberg single photon detector...
• Galactic double white dwarfs: connecting gravitational wave and electromagnetic observations of these systems...
• Low-frequency accelerometry: a new precision device to measure very small accelerations at low frequencies...
• Low-frequency gravitational waves: a new method of gravitational wave detection at low frequencies...
• Fifth force searches: probing new forces at micrometer scales...
• Magnetic monopoles: a new search strategy for monopoles...

Axions and wave-like dark matter#

• Rydberg single-photon detection for BREAD (2025): Rydberg-atom photon counting as the readout of the BREAD dish antenna, extending axion and dark photon searches across 0.1–10 meV mass range.
• GALILEO: Galactic Axion Laser Interferometer Leveraging Electro-Optics (2023): an interferometer that looks for dark matter-induced refractive-index oscillations in electro-optic crystals.
• Spectral distortions of astrophysical blackbodies as axion probes (2023): near-perfect blackbody stars constrain photon–axion conversion in magnetic fields along the line of sight.

WIMP dark matter#

• Diamond micro-chip for quantum microscopy (2024): fabrication and use of (111)-oriented NV diamond micro-chips for wide-field imaging of electrical currents.
• Directional detection of dark matter using solid-state quantum sensing (2022): a diamond-based detector concept that registers a nuclear recoil in real time, then reads the recoil direction from the damage track with quantum sensing. Directionality is what lets a WIMP search continue past the irreducible coherent neutrino scattering background.
• High-precision mapping of diamond crystal strain using quantum interferometry (2021): NV-ensemble spin interferometry that images crystal strain with a ~100× improvement in volume-normalized sensitivity. A proof of principle for localizing a strain feature — like one left by a dark matter or neutrino scattering — to a micron-scale volume in a diamond chip.

Ultraheavy dark matter#

• Searching for heavy charged relics in the Earth (2026): enrichment plus mass spectrometry to find charged relic particles accumulated in water, rock, and ice, down to ~10⁻²⁰ of the galactic dark matter abundance.
• Ultraheavy dark matter search with electron microscopy of geological quartz (2021): billion-year-old quartz as a track detector for ultraheavy dark matter, read out by electron microscopy imaging of melted damage tracks.

Galactic dynamics with compact objects#

• Measuring pulsar distances from chirping orbital periods (2026): orbital period derivatives of 21 binary pulsars turned into distance measurements, with the galactic acceleration contribution included.
• Gravothermal pileup of collisional dark matter around compact objects (2025): a strongly self-interacting dark matter subcomponent can accumulate around white dwarfs and neutron stars and become locally dominant, even while subdominant on larger scales.
• LISA double white dwarf binaries as Galactic accelerometers (2024): how galactic acceleration imprints on LISA's quasi-monochromatic binaries, and what that measures about the Milky Way potential.
• Milky Way accelerometry via millisecond pulsar timing (2020): extracting the local galactic acceleration directly from pulsar spin and orbital periods.

Early-universe signatures of new physics#

• Fingerprints of a non-inflationary universe from massive fields (2024): primordial standard clocks in a slowly contracting universe, with power spectrum features that differ from inflation's.
• Gravitational waves from stochastic scalar fluctuations (2023): spectator field fluctuations during inflation source a stochastic gravitational wave background within reach of future observatories.
• Classical cosmological collider physics and primordial features (2022): features during inflation excite fields far heavier than the Hubble scale, leaving mass-dependent oscillations in non-Gaussianity.

Community whitepapers and proceedings#

• MDvDM 2025 proceedings and MDvDM 2024 proceedings
• Mineral detection of neutrinos and dark matter: a whitepaper (2023)
• Snowmass 2021: dark matter direct detection to the neutrino fog (2022)
• Snowmass 2021: the landscape of low-threshold dark matter direct detection (2022)
• Snowmass 2021: ultraheavy particle dark matter (2022)

Everything else#

The complete, current record: Google Scholar · INSPIRE-HEP