Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item Studies of Ionization Backgrounds in Noble Liquid Detectors For Dark Matter Searches(2024) Mizrachi, Eli; Xu, Jingke; Hall, Carter; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Dark matter is believed to make up almost 85% of the total mass of the universe, yet its identity remains unclear. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) have historically been a favored dark matter candidate, and dual-phase noble liquid time projection chambers (TPCs) have set the strongest interaction limits to date on WIMPs with a mass greater than several GeV. However, because no definitive interactions have been observed, the parameter space for conventional WIMPs is highly constrained. This has sparked greater interest in new sub-GeV dark matter models. At this mass scale, dark matter interactions with xenon or argon target media may still produce detectable signals at or near the single electron limit. However, these signals are currently obscured by delayed ionization backgrounds (“electron trains”) which persist for seconds after an ionization event occurs. Electron trains have been observed in many different experiments and exhibit similar characteristics, but their cause is only partially understood. This work examines the nature of electron trains in various contexts, as well as possible strategies to mitigate them. First, a characterization of electron trains in the LZ experiment is presented, including new evidence of a dependence on detector conditions. The characterization also informed the development of an electron-train veto for LZ's first WIMP search, which set world-leading limits on the spin-independent and spin-dependent WIMP-nucleon cross-sections for medium and high-mass WIMPs. Next, to complement the analysis of LZ data, hardware upgrades were performed in XeNeu, a small xenon TPC at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. These included replacing plastics with low-outgassing metal and machinable ceramic components, as well as a replacement of XeNeu's photomultiplier tube array with silicon photomultipliers. The resulting reduction in the intensity of electron-trains and better position resolution from the respective upgrades will improve future studies of low energy interactions and phenomena. Concurrent with this work, XeNeu was used to perform a nuclear recoil calibration and a search for the Migdal effect, the latter of which can substantially enhance an experiment's low-mass dark matter sensitivity. Finally, the development of CoHerent Ionization Limits in Liquid Argon and Xenon (CHILLAX), is reported. CHILLAX is a new xenon-doped, dual-phase argon test stand that has the potential to have a higher sensitivity to low-mass dark matter interactions and lower backgrounds than current liquid xenon TPCs. The system is designed to handle high (percent level) xenon concentrations in liquid argon that can enable a range of ionization signal production and collection benefits. CHILLAX demonstrated the feasibility of such concepts by achieving a world record xenon doping concentration with stable operation.Item New Messengers & New Physics: A Survey of the High-energy Universe(2023) Crnogorcevic, Milena; Ricotti, Massimo; Caputo, Regina; Astronomy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Studying the origins of the high-energy emission in the Universe can profoundly affect our fundamental understanding of the cosmic origin and its evolution at the most extreme scales. In this dissertation, I explore the high-energy observations of different astrophysical systems to inform our understanding of the theoretical frameworks used to describe them. I harness the current multimessenger infrastructure to investigate questions ranging from new physics and transient astronomy to compact objects and extended emission in the gamma-ray, gravitational-wave, and neutrino skies. The focus in the first part of this dissertation is on utilizing the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) low-energy (LLE) technique to search for the light axion-like-particle (ALP) within the MeV gamma-ray emission of long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). We perform a data-driven sensitivity analysis to determine distances for which detection of an ALP signal is possible with the LLE technique, which, in contrast to the standard LAT analysis, allows for a larger effective area for energies down to 30 MeV. Assuming an ALP mass $m_a \lesssim 10^{-10}$~eV and ALP-photon coupling $g_{a\gamma} = 5.3\times 10^{-12}$ GeV$^{-1}$, we find that the distance limit ranges from $\sim\!0.5$ to $\sim\!10$~Mpc. We demonstrate that the sensitivity of the LLE technique to detecting light ALPs is comparable to the standard LAT analysis, making it an excellent complementary---yet independent---way to search for ALPs with \textit{Fermi}. Next, we select a candidate sample of twenty-four GRBs and conduct a model comparison analysis in which we consider different GRB spectral models with and without an ALP signal component. We find that including an ALP contribution does not result in any statistically significant improvement of the fits to the data. Motivated by the delay between the ALP emission time and the time of the jet break-out associated with its ordinary long-GRB emission, we conduct a novel search for ALPs within time windows that precede the main-episode gamma-ray emission of a long GRB, focusing on the sample of sources with known precursor emission detected with LAT and LLE. We report no statistically significant detection of ALPs within the GRB precursor emission and discuss the parts of the ALP parameter space probed with this method. Multimessenger astronomy is at the heart of the remainder of this dissertation. First, I present a follow-up search for excess emission of X-rays with the Swift Burst Alert Telescope (Swift-BAT) and that of gamma rays with the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (Fermi-GBM), in spatial and temporal correspondence to gravitational-wave events reported by the LIGO/Virgo/Kagra (LVK) Collaboration. In collaboration with the Fermi-GBM Team, we combine the observations from these two instruments to determine whether there is any statistically significant excess emission around the given gravitational-wave trigger. We report no new joint detections but present the joint flux upper limits. Finally, I present the results of the cross-correlation studies between the unresolved Fermi-LAT gamma-ray and the IceCube neutrino skies. We report no positive cross-correlation in the real-data sky maps. We then combine simulation and observation techniques to place upper limits on the fraction of neutrinos produced in proton-proton or proton-gamma interactions that occur in blazars. Assuming all gamma rays from unresolved blazars are produced from neutral pions via proton-proton interactions, we find that---for energies above 10~GeV---up to 60 % of the unresolved blazar population may contribute to the diffuse neutrino background (the fraction is 30 % for proton-gamma interactions). We also include predictions for the improved sensitivity considering 20 years of IceCube data.Item Novel Dark Matter Phenomenology At Colliders(2015) Wardlow, Kyle; Agashe, Kaustubh; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While a suitable candidate particle for dark matter (DM) has yet to be discovered, it is possible one will be found by experiments currently investigating physics on the weak scale. If discovered on that energy scale, the dark matter will likely be producible in significant quantities at colliders like the LHC, allowing the properties of and underlying physical model characterizing the dark matter to be precisely determined. I assume that the dark matter will be produced as one of the decay products of a new massive resonance related to physics beyond the Standard Model, and using the energy distributions of the associated visible decay products, develop techniques for determining the symmetry protecting these potential dark matter candidates from decaying into lighter Standard Model (SM) particles and to simultaneously measure the masses of both the dark matter candidate and the particle from which it decays.Item Simulations of Small Mass Structures in the Local Universe to Constrain the Nature of Dark Matter(2014) Polisensky, Emil; Ricotti, Massimo; Astronomy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)I use N-body simulations of the Milky Way and its satellite population of dwarf galaxies to probe the small-scale power spectrum and the properties of the unknown dark matter particle. The number of dark matter satellites decreases with decreasing mass of the dark matter particle. Assuming that the number of dark matter satellites exceeds or equals the number of observed satellites of the Milky Way, I derive a lower limit on the dark matter particle mass of mWDM > 2.1 keV for a thermal dark matter particle, with 95% confidence. The recent discovery of many new dark matter dominated satellites of the Milky Way in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey allows me to set a limit comparable to constraints from the complementary methods of Lyman-&alpha forest modeling and X-ray observations of the unresolved cosmic X-ray background and of halos from dwarf galaxy to cluster scales. I also investigate the claim that the largest subhalos in high resolution dissipationless cold dark matter (CDM) simulations of the Milky Way are dynamically inconsistent with observations of its most luminous satellites. I quantify the effects of the adopted cosmological parameters on the satellite densities and show the tension between observations and simulations adopting parameters consistent with WMAP9 is greatly diminished. I explore warm dark matter (WDM) cosmologies for 1-4 keV thermal relics. In 1 keV cosmologies subhalos have circular velocities at kpc scales 60% lower than their CDM counterparts, but are reduced by only 10% in 4 keV cosmologies. Recent reports of a detected X-ray line in emission from galaxy clusters has been argued as evidence of sterile neutrinos with properties similar to a 2 keV thermal relic. If confirmed, my simulations show they would naturally reconcile the densities of the brightest satellites and be consistent with the abundance of ultra-faint dwarfs. I conclude by using N-body simulations of a large set of dark matter halos in different CDM and WDM cosmologies to demonstrate that the spherically averaged density profile of dark matter halos has a shape that depends on the power spectrum of initial conditions. Virialization isotropizes the velocity dispersion in the inner regions of the halo but does not erase the memory of the initial conditions in phase space. I confirm that the slope of the inner density profile in CDM cosmologies depends on the halo mass with more massive halos exhibiting steeper profiles. My simulations support analytic models of halo structure that include angular momentum and argue against a universal form for the density profile.Item Flavored Dark Matter(2012) Agrawal, Prateek; Chacko, Zackaria; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Astrophysical observations point to the fact that most of the matter density in the universe is in the form of a non-luminous “dark matter”. No particles detected so far satisfy the criteria to be dark matter candidates. If the present day dark matter density is set by thermal freeze out due to the expansion of the universe, then the dark matter particles likely have weak-scale interactions with ordinary matter. This opens up the possibility of detecting them in current experiments. We focus on a novel class of models — flavored dark matter — which contains multiple copies, or flavors, of dark matter particles, in analogy with the three copies of matter particles observed in nature. We classify such models and consider their implications for various dark matter searches. As an example, we choose one specific model with tau flavored dark matter, and consider its prospects for detection at the Large Hadron Collider.