Highlights
Summaries of my recent research work are presented here. Students or postdocs who have worked on these projects are highlighted. For a complete list of my publications see my pages at Google Scholar, arXiv, and INSPIRE.
Gravitational Wave Detectors Moonlight as Dark Matter Probes
We show that non-observation of mergers of low-mass black holes, including presumably those of transmuted black holes (if they exist), already set interesting constraints on the nature of dark matter. By the end of this decade, data from LIGO-VIRGO-Kagra will set important limits on non-annihilating dark matter at masses and couplings that cannot be probed by other experiments.
Published in Physical Review Letters (with Sulagna Bhattacharya, Ranjan Laha, and Anupam Ray, 2023)
See popular coverage in TIFR News, Phys.Org, Physics World, Interesting Engineering and Media INAF (in Italian).
A Necessary Condition for Collective Neutrino Instability
We proved that neutrino flavor conversion can grow exponentially only if the phase space distributions of any two flavors cross each other at one (or more) locations, i.e., there is an excess of one flavor for some momenta and excess of the other at other momenta. The rich physics of collective flavor conversions, that can affect how stars explode, how elements are created, and what we will observe in neutrino telescopes looking at supernova explosions, is contingent on this simple condition.
Published in Physical Review Letters (2022).
See popular coverage by Vigyan Prasar and TIFR News.
A Deuterated Scintillator Detector for Neutrinos
We proposed a new type of neutrino detector, based on using deuterated hydrocarbons doped with Gadolinium. It is expected to be able to detect all flavors of neutrinos from a galactic supernova. It is expected to have interesting capability for solar and atmospheric neutrino detection.
Published in JCAP (with Bhavesh Chauhan and Vivek Datar, 2021).
Fast Depolarization of Supernova Neutrinos
We showed that neutrinos of different flavors emitted from the core of a supernova tend to take on approximately but not exactly similar spectra. This result paves the way for definitive predictions of supernova neutrino signals and inclusion of fast neutrino oscillations into supernova simulations.
Published in Physical Review D (with Soumya Bhattacharyya, 2022).
Published in Physical Review Letters (with Soumya Bhattacharyya, 2021).
Published in Physical Review D (with Soumya Bhattacharyya, 2020).
Black Holes that Break the Chandrasekhar Limit
Chandrasekhar famously showed that black holes borne of stars cannot be lighter than about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. We show that dark matter accumulated in the core of neutron stars may undergo self-gravitating collapse and give transmuted black holes that can be lighter than the Chandrasekhar limit. We present several ways to look for these transmuted black holes, including using next-generation gravitational wave detectors.
Published in Physical Review Letters (with Ranjan Laha and Anupam Ray, 2021).
See popular coverage in TIFR News.
This possibility became apparent to us because of a clearer understanding of dark matter capture in stars, via multiple scattering and through interactions mediated by lighter particles, as shown in these papers.
Published in JCAP (with Aritra Gupta and Anupam Ray, 2019).
Published in JCAP (with Aritra Gupta and Anupam Ray, 2020).
Looking for Primordial Black Holes
Some part of dark matter could consist of small, roughly asteroid mass, black holes that formed almost immediately after the Big Bang. We have used available data from neutrino telescopes, gamma ray telescopes, as well as radio telescopes, to set strong constraints on this possibility.
Published in Physical Review Letters (with Ranjan Laha and Anupam Ray, 2020).
Published in JCAP (with Shikhar Mittal, Girish Kulkarni, and Anupam Ray, 2021).
Selection Rule for Sommerfeld Enhancement of Dark Matter Annihilation
We pointed out a mechanism that selectively changes the annihilation of dark matter pairs with either odd or even angular momentum. The selection mechanism works if there are two or more dark matter species that mix with each other due to long-range interactions. As a consequence, the annihilation rate is distinctively large and strongly velocity-dependent, and can offer a unique explanation for the AMS-02 anomaly.
Published in Physical Review Letters (with Anirban Das, 2017).
See Inside Science, Asian Scientist, Science Daily, and TIFR News for popular coverage.
Fast Neutrino Flavor Conversion in Supernovae
Neutrino fluxes from a supernova can show substantial flavor conversions almost immediately above the core if the angular distributions are non-trivial. We showed that neutrinos traveling towards the core make fast conversions possible for a wider range of flux ratios of neutrinos and antineutrinos. Using fluxes and angular distributions predicted by supernova simulations, we found that fast conversions can occur within tens of nanoseconds. Flavor-dependent momentum-changing collisions of neutrinos play an important role in making this happen.
Published in JCAP (with Alessandro Mirizzi and Manibrata Sen, 2017)
Published in Physical Review Letters (with Francesco Capozzi, Alessandro Mirizzi, Manibrata Sen, and Gunter Sigl, 2019)
See related popular coverage in The Hindu.