Thread by @IBJIYONGI

The closing plenary at #ICHEP2018 is the best plenary: dark matter and astroparticle physics 🙌🏽

Imagine 6.5 tonnes of Xenon! #ICHEP2018

Being a scientist requires extraordinary patience. We keep pecking away at dark matter, even though we still haven’t seen it after decades of searching. #ICHEP2018

And nowwwww: axion searches. I was sad to miss the session on this because it was at the same time was my talk about axion theory 😩 #ICHEP2018

For when your kid asks, “where do axions come from?” You can say, “QCD” :-) #ICHEP2018

This is a log-log plot, folks. The range is huge! #ICHEP2018

People often incorrectly believe that the axion’s only standard model coupling is electromagnetic but actually there is a fermion coupling that is of interest. #ICHEP2018

Related, most experiments are using magnetic fields for direct detection. (Unrelated: oh my god, experiment is hard. I’m glad to be a theorist.) #ICHEP2018

Lol my UW colleague Gray Rybka just asked Yannis how long before we find the axion LMAO #ichep2018

Our next speaker Martin Drees will talk about dark matter theory. Trivia: he got married at our conference venue 17 years ago. #ICHEP2018

This is important: dark matter is actually transparent, not dark! Calling it dark matter is bad physics, basically. #ICHEP2018

On the list of reasons why Black people and dark matter are terrible analogs: Black people are not transparent. If we were, it would be harder for police to shoot us constantly. But I digress.

Zwicky first guessed that galaxy clusters were mostly made of non-visible matter and called it dark matter in 1933. Vera Rubin provided first verification in the 60s. #ICHEP2018

Galaxy cluster observations aren’t only data that require presence of another type of matter. cosmic microwave background radiation data also requires it or else data and models are not consistent. #ICHEP2018

CMB is affirmed by Big Bang nucleosynthesis data. #ICHEP2018

Great to see acknowledgement of modified gravity in this talk, as an alternative to dark matter, not because I think it’s correct but because we still don’t know for sure what’s going on and this is the right, scientific approach #ICHEP2018

And now, a curvature-based explanation: black holes! LIGO saw an unexpected number of stellar mass BHs. But it’s hard to get the primordial black hole mass spectrum right. #ICHEP2018

Claim: primordial black holes need fine tuning.
Me: don’t all dark matter candidates? 😬😩
#ICHEP2018

Dark matter’s physical movement is significantly altered by its lack of light emission — it can’t get rid of energy the way everything else does, by emitting photons. (We emit photons, fellow mammals! Night goggles can see them.) #ICHEP2018

Why am I the only one giggling about him saying “astrophysics is really just physics 101”? I mean, I hear what he’s saying but lolol #ICHEP2018

The slide ^ is important because those are the constraints that guide how theorists do their dark matter model building. I’m building a model right now and we have to take these things into account. #ICHEP2018

I wish people liked my physics tweets as much as they like my tweets about racism 😩😢

Take home: dark matter is real.

MAYBE? WE HOPE? I’m a freaked out junior professor lol

#ICHEP2018

Also: we don’t know much about these particles. #understatement #ICHEP2018

(Public health wife tangential: it seems many #ICHEP2018 participants also got a cold. Someone got the rest of us sick!! <shakes fist>)

And now a talk which is going to mention the ... cursed? ... B-modes #ICHEP2018

Cosmic microwave background astronomy is a precision science like high energy particle physics #ICHEP2018

This cosmology equation is typically the first one a young cosmologist derives. I first derived it as part of a homework problem for a class taught by Avi Loeb in 2002.

Pretty good summary of our understanding of inflation. What this slide doesn’t say is that inflation was invented by Alan Guth WHO IS THE AWESOMEST. #ICHEP2018

This ain’t like no other polar bear you’ve ever seen #ICHEP2018 (tangentially: Sharon Traweek discusses particle physicist proclivity to give things f/punny names in her anthropological study Beamtimes and Lifetimes)

Effectively where we are with CMB power spectrum measurements #ICHEP2018

Lots of shout outs to @DrBrianKeating-led @SimonsObs collaboration! #ICHEP2018

Suggestion that string theory is in trouble from a cosmological standpoint ... 😬 #ICHEP2018

HELLO DARK ENERGY, MY OLD DISSERTATION NEMESIS

This is a tension we should pay more attention to, I think. #ICHEP2018