Abstract
Motivated by open questions such as the matter-antimatter asymmetry, the dark sector and a quantum theory of gravity, the speaker will talk about theories beyond the standard cosmological and gravitational paradigms, in particular the theoretical and observational prospects of such theories. He will explain a parameterization he developed to use gravitational waves (GWs) for constraining a wide class of theories beyond general relativity (GR) in explicitly parity-violating and parity-invariant contributions. Such theories can contain candidates for the dark sector, including axions, Kalb-Ramond dark matter, U(1) vector fields and the dilaton. As such, this parameterization facilitates probing beyond-GR theories using compact objects, galactic halos, and cosmological evolution, in addition to other observational windows aside from GWs.
Dr. Tatsuya Daniel is a Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University's Trottier Space Institute in Montreal, Canada. He obtained his bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and his PhD from Brown University. His research interests are broad and include early universe cosmology, tests of general relativity, modified theories of gravity, gravitational waves and machine learning.