Graduate Students

Dark Energy Survey census of the smallest galaxies hones the search for dark matter

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This story is adapted from one originally published by Fermilab

Today, scientists in the Dark Energy Survey — including UW–Madison assistant professor of physics Keith Bechtol and his research group — released results that have been five years in the making. Researchers used the world’s most complete census of dwarf galaxies around our Milky Way galaxy to probe the nature of dark matter, an invisible form of matter that dominates the universe. These new measurements provide information about what dark matter can and cannot be made of.

In particular, the new results constrain the minimum mass of the dark matter particles, as well as the strength of interactions between dark matter and normal matter.

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Keith Bechtol

According to these new results, a dark matter particle must be heavier than a zeptoelectronvolt, which is 10-21 electronvolts. That’s one trillionth of a trillionth of the mass of an electron. This study also shows that dark matter’s interactions with normal matter must be roughly 1,000 times weaker than the weak nuclear force. Of the known forces, only gravity is weaker.

These novel measurements used data from the Dark Energy Survey, a cosmological survey designed to study dark energy, the mysterious force driving the accelerated expansion of the universe. In contrast, dark matter is gravitationally attractive, resisting the expansion of the universe and gravitationally binding astronomical systems such as galaxies. The smallest “dwarf” galaxies can have hundreds to thousands of times more dark matter than normal matter. Over the past five years, the Dark Energy Survey has combined with other surveys to more than double the known population of these tiny galaxies. The current total is now over 50.

“The large number of dwarf galaxies that we found orbiting the Milky Way is consistent with expectations from the simplest picture of dark matter — that is, comprising slow-moving particles that interact only through gravity,” Bechtol explained. “In this new paper, we rule out several alternative possibilities for the nature of dark matter.”

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Mitch McNanna

Dark matter makes up 85% of the matter in the universe, but we have yet to detect it directly in the laboratory. The gravitational effects of dark matter are clearly visible in the motions of stars in galaxies, the clumpy distribution of galaxies in the universe, and even in the amount of lightweight elements. The robust astronomical evidence for the existence of dark matter has motivated many experimental searches here on Earth, using instruments ranging from cryogenic detectors buried deep underground to energetic particle colliders.

“The faintest galaxies are among the most valuable tools we have to learn about dark matter because they are sensitive to several of its fundamental properties all at once,” said Ethan Nadler, the study’s lead author and graduate student at Stanford University and SLAC.

In these multi-year, multi-telescope sky surveys, the raw data comes in the form of tens of thousands high-resolution digital images. But identifying these ultrafaint galaxies, as their description implies, is not as simple as looking at an image and seeing a faint smudge of light. Bechtol and his group, including physics grad student Mitch McNanna, designed the search algorithms needed to identify, with some statistical assurance, which individual stars are part of a dwarf galaxy.

“We worked closely with experts in galaxy formation and particle physics theory to compare the Dark Energy Survey observations with predictions,” Bechtol said. “Part of our job was to determine the sensitivity of our search — how far away from the Earth could we spot a galaxy with only a few hundred stars?”

By combining the observed census of dwarf galaxies with advanced cosmological simulations of the distribution of dark matter around the Milky Way, scientists were able to predict how the physical properties of dark matter would affect the number of small galaxies. Small galaxies form in regions where the dark matter density in the early universe is very slightly above average. Physical processes that smooth out these regions of higher density (if dark matter moves too quickly or gains energy due to interactions with normal matter) or prevent density variations from collapsing to form galaxies (thanks to quantum interference effects) would reduce the number of galaxies observed by the Dark Energy Survey.

“Astrophysical observations provide unique information about the fundamental nature of dark matter, and are complementary to searches for dark matter particles in terrestrial experiments.” Bechtol said. “With the Dark Energy Survey, we continue to learn about the deep connection between particle physics and the growth of cosmic structure, ranging from the vast network of galaxies in the cosmic web, down to smallest individual galaxies.”

two circles with clusters of stars in them, showing predictions of warm dark matter (fewer stars visible) on the left and cold dark matter (far more stars) on the right
This shows the result of two numerical simulations predicting the distribution of dark matter around a galaxy similar to our Milky Way. The left panel assumes that dark matter particles were moving fast in the early universe (warm dark matter), while the right panel assumes that dark matter particles were moving slowly (cold dark matter). The warm dark matter model predicts many fewer small clumps of dark matter surrounding our galaxy and thus many fewer satellite galaxies that inhabit these small clumps of dark matter. By measuring the number of satellite galaxies, scientists can distinguish between these models of dark matter. | Image: Bullock and Boylan-Kolchin (2017); simulations by V. Robles, T. Kelley and B. Bozek, in collaboration with Bullock and Boylan-Kolchin

The Dark Energy Survey is a collaboration of more than 300 scientists from 25 institutions in six countries. For more information about the survey, please visit the experiment’s website.

Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago Funding Authority for Funding and Projects in Brazil, Carlos Chagas Filho Foundation for Research Support of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development and the Ministry of Science and Technology, the German Research Foundation and the collaborating institutions in the Dark Energy Survey.

 

 

Vandenbroucke group plays instrumental role in proving viability of innovative gamma-ray telescope

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Scientists in the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) consortium have detected gamma rays from the Crab Nebula using the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (pSCT), proving the viability of the novel telescope design for use in gamma-ray astrophysics. The announcement was made today by Justin Vandenbroucke, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, on behalf of the CTA Consortium at the virtual 236th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).

“The Crab Nebula is the brightest steady source of TeV, or very high-energy, gamma rays in the sky, so detecting it is an excellent way of proving the pSCT technology,” says Vandenbroucke, who is also affiliated with the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) at UW–Madison. “Very high-energy gamma rays are the highest energy photons in the universe and can unveil the physics of extreme objects, including black holes and possibly dark matter.”

Vandenbroucke is coleader of a team made up of WIPAC scientists and other collaborators that developed and operate a critical part of the telescope: its high-speed camera. Vandenbroucke has worked on the design, construction, and integration of the camera since 2009.

Read the full story on the WIPAC website. The WIPAC story was adapted from a CTA press release.

Keith Bechtol, Rob Morgan win UW’s Cool Science Image contest

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pieced-together photos of space with a helix nebula the most visibleCongrats to Prof. Keith Bechtol and graduate student Rob Morgan for their winning entry in the UW–Madison Cool Science Images contest! Their winning entry — one of 12 selected out of 101 entries — earns them a large-format print which initially will be displayed in a gallery at the McPherson Eye Research Institute’s gallery in the WIMR building.

This snapshot of the sky contains thousands of distant galaxies, each containing billions of stars. Bechtol and Morgan were looking for the flash of the explosion of a single star, the potential source of a sub-atomic particle called a neutrino, spotted zipping through the Earth by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole. The distant galaxies, swirling billions of light years away, are all the harder to see because of nearby objects, like the pictured Helix Nebula. The image was captured with a Dark Energy Camera and Victor M. Blanco telescope.

To learn more about the Cool Science Images contest and to view the other winning images, please visit https://news.wisc.edu/the-winners-cool-science-images-2020/.

 

Manipulating the magnetic response to light in natural materials

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When light moves from one material into another, it bends — like how a partially submerged object appears distorted under water when viewed from above. What if, instead of bending, a material could change the light so much that the material was no longer visible at all?

In a study published in Physical Review A, University of Wisconsin­–Madison researchers have shown for the first time that a similar response can be obtained and manipulated in naturally-occurring materials. The findings have implications from the development of “perfect” lenses for improved microscopy to Harry Potter-esque invisibility cloaks.

Visible light is made of both magnetic and electric fields, and the refractive index of a material — how much it bends the light — is determined by how the material interacts with those two fields. Nearly all materials we encounter in everyday life, though, interact entirely with light’s electric field.

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Zach Buckholtz

Researchers have spent the past two decades developing artificial materials that more strongly interact with light’s magnetic field by manipulating the refractive index. With a strong enough response, the material could eventually have a negative refractive index, leading to unique optical properties. However, the response in synthetic materials is limited by the size of their repeating units. A naturally-occurring crystal that has much smaller unit cells is likely a better choice.

“Part of producing a negative refractive index is that the material needs to have a strong response to both electric and magnetic fields, so the big challenge is getting that magnetic response in natural materials,” explains Zach Buckholtz, a graduate student in UW–Madison physics professor Deniz Yavuz’s group and lead author of the study. “A few years ago, we published a paper showing that the crystal we’re working with has a magnetic response, and in this study, we were able to manipulate the response.”

The natural material Buckholtz is working with is a silicon-based crystal, which in general is optically ordinary, except that it has been “doped” with the rare earth metal Europium. Rare earth metals are unique in that they contain an abundance of electrons in the atoms’ outer energy shells. Those electrons can then work together to create a bigger magnetic response, but only if they are all in tune with each other.

“If you have some magnetic response and a much larger electric response to light, you can connect those two responses,” Buckholtz says. “To get to a negative refractive index from there, you have to set up coherences between the energy levels, meaning you have to make sure all those energy levels are oscillating together.”

the apparatus hosting the rare earth metal doped crystal glows orange, and the background of the photo has a green fluorescence hue from the input laser
The experimental setup in the Yavuz lab. The orange glow is from the fluorescing crystal, with the green laser providing the green hue outside the chamber.

To show they can manipulate the magnetic response, Buckholtz and Yavuz did two things. First, because the crystal is a mix of ions with slightly different electron responses, they needed to set up their experimental system to select for one class of ion. This uniformity allows for a cleaner interpretation of the results.

“We send a laser into the crystal, and then measure how much of the light is transmitted. But because the crystal isn’t perfect, instead of seeing a narrow peak for the transitions, you’ll see a really broad transition,” Buckholtz explains. “So, we do this procedure known as spectral hole burning to clear out the ions we don’t want and then we’ll be left with just one transition, which is necessary to move on to experiments that involve coherence.”

Next, they wanted to show if they could increase the magnetic response. To do so, they needed to take those selected ions, put them in coherence, and then measure the response compared to ions not in coherence. In these experiments, they shined one (a probe beam) or two (probe and coupling beam) wavelengths of laser at the ions. Both lasers excite electrons in the ions to a higher-energy state, and the scientists can again measure how might light is transmitted through the crystal as a readout of the electron transitions.

“With just the probe beam, we see just the normal transition, and that’s what we did in our previous study. But with the coupling beam added in, it connects and adds another transition state in there,” Buckholtz says. “If those states are in coherence, they cancel each other out, and we see that effect as a peak in transmitted light, which means the index of refraction is going toward zero.”

Buckholtz notes that the magnetic response they see is not yet large enough to produce the materials with interesting new optical properties they are hoping for. Still, he says, this work provides a path forward to continue manipulations to improve the response, such as investigating different rare earth metals.

“We have a magnetic response, we can set up coherence, and we can manipulate the response,” Buckholtz says. “Now, we want to increase the scale of the response to with a goal of eventually making the refractive index below zero.”

The Milky Way’s satellites help reveal link between dark matter halos and galaxy formation

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This story was adapted from one originally published by Nathan Collins at SLAC. Read the original version here.

Just as the sun has planets and the planets have moons, our galaxy has satellite galaxies, and some of those might have smaller satellite galaxies of their own. To wit, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a relatively large satellite galaxy visible from the southern hemisphere, is thought to have brought at least six of its own satellite galaxies with it when it first approached the Milky Way, based on recent measurements from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission.

Astrophysicists believe that dark matter is responsible for much of that structure, and now researchers with the Dark Energy Survey — including University of Wisconsin­–Madison assistant professor of physics Keith Bechtol and his research group — have drawn on observations of faint galaxies around the Milky Way to place tighter constraints on the connection between the size and structure of galaxies and the dark matter halos that surround them. At the same time, they have found more evidence for the existence of LMC satellite galaxies and made a new prediction: If the scientists’ models are correct, the Milky Way should have an additional 150 or more very faint satellite galaxies awaiting discovery by next-generation projects such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

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Prof. Keith Bechtol

Two new studies, forthcoming in the Astrophysical Journal and available as preprints (pre-print 1; pre-print 2), are part of a larger effort to understand how dark matter works on scales smaller than our galaxy.

“The ultra-faint galaxies that orbit the Milky Way are small clouds of dark matter with just enough stars to see that they exist. They are nearly invisible, but if spotted, they make excellent natural laboratories to study dark matter,” Bechtol says. “We hope to learn what dark matter is made of, how it was produced in the early Universe, and what relationship it has to the known particle species.”

Shining galaxies’ light on dark matter

Astronomers have long known the Milky Way has satellite galaxies, including the Large Magellanic Cloud, which can be seen by the naked eye from the southern hemisphere, but the number was thought to be around just a dozen or so until around the year 2000. Since then, the number of observed satellite galaxies has risen dramatically. Thanks to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and more recent discoveries by projects including the Dark Energy Survey (DES), the number of known satellite galaxies has climbed to about 60.

Such discoveries are always exciting, but what’s perhaps most exciting is what the data could tell us about the cosmos. “For the first time, we can look for these satellite galaxies across about three-quarters of the sky, and that’s really important to several different ways of learning about dark matter and galaxy formation,” said Risa Wechsler, director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC). Last year, for example, the DES team used data on satellite galaxies in conjunction with computer simulations to place much tighter limits on dark matter’s interactions with ordinary matter.

Now, the team is using data from a comprehensive search over most of the sky to ask different questions, including how much dark matter it takes to form a galaxy, how many satellite galaxies we should expect to find around the Milky Way and whether galaxies can bring their own satellites into orbit around our own – a key prediction of the most popular model of dark matter.

Hints of galactic hierarchy

The answer to that last question appears to be a resounding “yes.”

The possibility of detecting a hierarchy of satellite galaxies first arose some years back when DES detected more satellite galaxies in the vicinity of the Large Magellanic Cloud than they would have expected if those satellites were randomly distributed throughout the sky. More data was needed to conclusively attribute this excess to galaxies that arrived at the Milky Way with the Large Magellanic Cloud.

map of observational areas from the DES and Pan-STARRS survey shows which regions of the sky were covered in this analysis. Areas darkened out were not covered, white areas were where data was collected and from where it was analyzed
The two studies probed, analyzed and characterized data from years of observation in two sky surveys.

In the first published study, the DES group combined observations from DES with those from the Pan-STARRS survey, together covering 75% of the sky, to test this hypothesis. The DES data represents nearly 40,000 images from a 500-million-pixel camera collected over three years from a telescope in Chile.

The raw DES data was run through a series of data compressions, including a final step led by Bechtol’s group, to identify and catalog individual stars, including their color, which infers temperature, and how far away they are.

“We throw the star catalog into our search algorithms, which are responsible for identifying small groups of stars that are clustered in space and have similar colors and brightness. There’s a particular distribution for what we expect the stars to look like in ultrafaint galaxies,” says UW-Madison physics graduate student Mitch McNanna. “Even then we’re not 100 percent sure that we’ve found a real galaxy, so we also collect spectroscopic observations to measure the doppler motion of the stars. Hopefully we see the group of stars is moving in a way that’s different from the rest of the stars in the Milky Way halo.”

The team, including Alex Drlica-Wagner at Fermilab, produced a model of which satellite galaxies are most likely to be seen by current surveys, given where they are in the sky as well as their brightness, size and distance.

In the second study, led by others in the DES team including Ethan Nadler at Stanford University and collaborators, the team took the findings of the latest satellite census and analyzed computer simulations of millions of possible universes. Those simulations model the formation of dark matter structure that permeates the Milky Way, including details such as smaller dark matter clumps within the Milky Way that are expected to host satellite galaxies. To connect dark matter to galaxy formation, the researchers used a flexible model that allows them to account for uncertainties in the current understanding of galaxy formation, including the relationship between galaxies’ brightness and the mass of dark matter clumps within which they form.

Those components in hand, the team ran their model with a wide range of parameters and searched for simulations in which LMC-like objects fell into the gravitational pull of a Milky Way-like galaxy. By comparing those cases with galactic observations, they could infer a range of astrophysical parameters, including how many satellite galaxies should have tagged along with the LMC. The results were consistent with Gaia observations: Six satellite galaxies should currently be detected in the vicinity of the LMC, moving with roughly the right velocities and in roughly the same places as astronomers had previously observed. The simulations also suggested that the LMC first approached the Milky Way about 2.2 billion years ago, consistent with high-precision measurements of the motion of the LMC from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Galaxies yet unseen

In addition to the LMC findings, the team also put limits on the connection between dark matter halos and galaxy structure. For example, in simulations that most closely matched the history of the Milky Way and the LMC, the smallest galaxies astronomers could currently observe should have stars with a combined mass of around a hundred suns, and about a million times as much dark matter. According to an extrapolation of the model, the faintest galaxies that could ever be observed could form in halos up to a hundred times less massive than that.

And there could be more discoveries to come: If the simulations are correct, there are around 150 more satellite galaxies – more than double the number already discovered – hovering around the Milky Way. The discovery of those galaxies would help confirm the researchers’ model of the links between dark matter and galaxy formation, and likely place tighter constraints on the nature of dark matter itself.

M.S. in Physics-Quantum Computing

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The Department of Physics is adding a new degree program focused on the growing field of quantum computing. The M.S. in Physics-Quantum Computing is a new Master’s program that will admit its first class in the Fall 2019 semester. The program will provide students with a thorough grounding in the new discipline of quantum information and quantum computing.

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