Directly detecting particle dark matter with LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA

Dark matter is one of the most mysterious phenonomen of the universe. While many models exist to explain it, none have been proven correct. With gravitational-wave interferometers, we could directly detect ultralight dark matter that could interact with the components of the interferometers themselves. Depending on what kind of dark matter – axions, dark photons, dilatons, tensor bosons –, the interaction with standard-model particles will differ, but the signal arising from each of them would be very similar. I work to develop ways of detecting dark matter that would couple very weakly to the instruments, and give rise to a correlated, almost noise-like monochromatic signal in each interferometer, and also to distinguish between different types of dark-matter interactions with standard-model particles. Some of my works on this can be found here: an excess power method we developed, a search for dark photon dark matter in LIGO/Virgo O3 data, and a method to distinguish between dark-matter models