Kimmy Cushman

Kimmy Cushman's picture
She/her/hers
Research Areas: 
Particle Physics
Research Type: 
Theorist
Education: 
Ph.D. 2024, Yale University
Honors & Awards: 
  • 2022 P.E.O. Scholar Award
  • 2022 Yale 3-Minute Thesis Competition
  • 2019 Alexander A. McCormick, Jr. Memorial Scholarship Fund
  • 2018 DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship
Advisor: 
George Fleming
Dissertation Title: 
Stealth Dark Matter with Lattice Field Theory
Dissertation Abstract: 

Dark matter dominates the matter content of the Universe, but its composition remains a mystery. Here, we investigate a strongly interacting SU(4) gauge theory called stealth dark matter, which is analogous to QCD in that it produces a spectrum of composite particles whose mass is generated by the strong dynamics. The lightest mass baryon of stealth dark matter is the dark matter candidate, which may naturally exhibit a self-interaction that could be compared to astrophysical constraints. This work constitutes the first milestone in the research program to calculate stealth dark matter self-interactions with lattice field theory. We present the first LapH smearing, irrep projected results of the SU(4) stealth dark matter baryon spectrum, and present the first results of the odd-parity baryon spectrum. For three points in the stealth dark matter parameter space, at three different choices of degenerate quark masses, we resolved the even-parity baryon ordering with greater precision and reduced systematic error compared to previous work.