Tuesdays 10:30 - 11:30 | Fridays 11:30 - 12:30
Showing votes from 2020-10-09 12:30 to 2020-10-13 11:30 | Next meeting is Tuesday Sep 16th, 10:30 am.
Light, asteroid-mass primordial black holes, with lifetimes in the range between hundreds to several millions times the age of the universe, are well-motivated candidates for the cosmological dark matter. Using archival COMPTEL data, we improve over current constraints on the allowed parameter space of primordial black holes as dark matter by studying their evaporation to soft gamma-rays in nearby astrophysical structures. We point out that a new generation of proposed MeV gamma-ray telescopes will offer the unique opportunity to directly detect Hawking evaporation from observations of nearby dark matter dense regions and to constrain, or discover, the primordial black hole dark matter.
I argue that in the Lagrangian formulation of standard, Galilei-invariant Newtonian mechanics there are subtle but concrete signs of {\em Lorentz} invariance. In fact, in a specific sense made explicit in the paper, Newtonian mechanics is more Lorentz-invariant than Galilei-invariant. So, special relativity could have been discovered deductively, before there were any indications---such as Maxwell's equations---that Galilei relativity had to be modified. To make this anti-historical exercise less academic, I derive certain velocity-dependent corrections to long-range interactions between spinless point particles. Such corrections are universal; in particular, they do not depend on the spin of the field mediating such interactions or on how strongly coupled such a field is. I discuss potential applications to the post-Newtonian expansion of general relativity.
In spacetimes of any dimensionality, the massless particle states that can be created and destroyed by a field in a given representation of the Lorentz group are severely constrained by the condition that the invariant Abelian subgroup of the little group must leave these states invariant. A number of examples are given of the massless one-particle states that can be described by various tensor and spinor-tensor fields, and a speculation is offered for the general case.