Just like light waves, gravitational waves (GWs) can undergo gravitational lensing. When the characteristic size of the lens is much larger than the wavelength of the GWs, the phenomenon is referred to as strong lensing. Strong lensing produces multiple copies of the same gravitational wave event which arrive at the detector as repeated signals. When the source is quadruply lensed, we can...
The tidal response of a compact object is a key gravitational-wave observable encoding information about its interior. This link is subtle due to the nonlinearities of general relativity. We
show that considering a scattering process bypasses challenges with potential ambiguities, as the
tidal response is determined by the asymptotic in- and outgoing waves at null infinity. As an application...
The dark photon is a well-motivated new particle, arising from a renormalizable interaction with the photon field. This so-called vector portal can lead to a dark sector, which can contain candidates for dark matter. In this talk, I discuss searches for dark photons at photon-electron colliders, with applications to LUXE and a future Gamma Factory, and electron-positron colliders, with a focus...
Heavy diatomic molecules are currently considered to be among the most sensitive systems used in the search for the P,T-violating effects and in probing the Standard Model of particle physics. In certain molecules effects resulting from both parity violation and time-reversal violation (P,T - odd effects) are considerably enhanced with respect to atomic systems. The strength of these...
The probabilities for flavour transitions between quarks via the weak interaction are parametrised by the different elements of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix. There is a long standing puzzle related to these, in which the elements that describe the up-bottom ( Vub ) and charm-bottom ( Vcb ) transitions show a tension when determined in exclusive decays (when the final state is...
Rare-event searches such as dark matter direct detection experiments rely on accurate detection of scintillation photons to observe signals from very low-energy events. It has been suggested that materials used in the construction of these experiments, such as PTFE, can fluoresce under excitation from the target material’s scintillation light. This scintillation light is in the vacuum...
Since the revolutionary discovery of gravitational wave (GW) emission from a binary black hole merger in 2015, the remarkable GW detectors LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA have detected ninety compact object mergers. These events are transforming modern astronomy. In particular, the first binary neutron star merger, dubbed GW170817, was observed in both gravitational and electromagnetic radiation, thus...
Quantum computers hold great future promise for performing more energy efficient and especially faster calculations for various complex problems by making use of algorithms with quantum speed-up. The most famous of these is the so-called Grover search algorithm. One, maybe less known, research area where quantum computers may possible become of great importance is Artificial Intelligence (AI)...
