Degree Date
May 2024
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.