Research Projects

There are many reasons to suspect that there could be very light Bosonic particles in nature other than the ones familiar from the standard model of elementary particle physics. Their very existence and the details of their properties can have observable implications for astrophysical and cosmological systems. E.g. they might or not be dark matter, they could act as dark energy or early dark energy or simply be a subdominant component of dark matter - in all such cases, the observational implications are distinct. It is important to understand the origin of these Bosons in various theories, calculate their observational signatures and interpret the observational data to impose constraints on the theories which predict them. In addition, it is important to ensure that any such model which predicts these particle does not have other undesired implications. Finally, it is important to see if models which are thus observationally preferred can also be embedded in a consistent fundamental theory of nature. In this project, we propose to constrain models which lead to light Bosons of cosmological relevance using all of these theoretical and observational tools.