Subhendra Mohanty - Astroparticle Physics and Cosmology: Perspectives in the Multimessenger Era

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In the last decade, there have been several seminal discoveries starting with the Higgs boson at the LHC (2012); neutrinos with PeV energies at IceCube (2013); detection of gravitational waves from black hole and neutron star mergers by LIGO (2016) and the first picture of the black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy by the EHT (2019). This comes after the success of the solar, atmospheric and reactor neutrino observation experiments in the last three decades and the cosmic microwave anisotropy measurement experiments (COBE (19891993), WMAP (20012011) and PLANCK( 20092011)). Terrestrial dark matter detection experiments continue to put limits on the mass and cross-section of dark matter (if at all they are elementary particles). Astronomical observations are ongoing in a very large range of the electromagnetic spectrum (from radio to gamma rays) in addition to the observations of high energy neutrinos by IceCube. This ongoing multi-pronged observation of the universe will help us to answer the fundamental questions about the underlying theories that govern the universe.

In this book, we explore the theoretical consequences of these multi-messenger signals from the universe. A graduate student or researcher who is curious about learning a particular research topic may delve into the chapter of their choice to get an introduction to the subject. The treatment is more pedagogical and focussed compared with a review article. The main results discussed are worked out in the text.

In Chap. , we give a survey of the recent experimental observations, which started the multi-messenger era of astronomical observations like observations of gravitational waves, gamma rays, neutrinos and cosmic rays from the same source (e.g. blazers). We also list other important unsolved issues like final unobserved signal of the inflation paradigm, namely the observation of inflation-generated gravitational waves in the early universe via the measurement of the B-mode polarization of the CMB signal.

Dark matter is amongst the hottest areas of enquiry in particle physics and cosmology. In Chap. , we discuss the phenomenology of dark matter at cosmological and galactic scales. Direct detection experiments like Xenon-1T have ruled out a large swathe of the mass vs DMnucleon cross-section parameter space challenging the conventional paradigm of the 100 GeV weakly interacting dark matter, where the observed relic density is naturally accounted for. New mechanisms for explaining the relic density like the freeze-in production of dark matter or the 32 annihilation process are required for evading the stringent constraints from direct detection experiments. Dark matter may be very light with a mass of 1022 eV, or they may not be elementary particles at all and may be primordial black holes.

Large-scale galactic surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Dark Energy Survey and Baryon Oscillations Spectroscopy Survey are increasingly providing data about the distribution of matter in the universe and provide a scope for us to test theories of dark matter, dark energy, neutrino mass, etc. To test theory with observations from the survey, we need to understand perturbations of the metric and matter (dark matter, baryons, photons, neutrinos) in the framework of general relativity. We do this in Chap. 3.