Theory HEP Seminar

Making Waves in the Sea of Weakly-Coupled Bosons

Ken Van Tilburg

NYU

Particles embedded in a background of weakly-coupled fields can experience long-range “wake forces” arising from their mutual disturbance of the ambient medium. These forces, proportional to the energy density of the background and shaped by its phase-space distribution, open new avenues for probing weakly-coupled particle backgrounds, including dark matter. I will present a perturbative framework for understanding wake forces, and show how they can lead to unique signatures in precision force experiments. In addition, I will discuss the production of a low-velocity background of particles, the solar basin—an accumulation of weakly-interacting particles produced by the Sun and trapped on bound orbits in the Solar System. I will show new results on its orbital dynamics and how temporal modulation provides a striking discovery channel. Together, these results chart a path toward detecting seas of non-relativistic particles in hidden sectors.