Proud (co!)supervisor moment
Alan Duffy
Proud (co!)supervisor moment here with 3 incredible students graduating across a range of disciplines… Dr Tom Graham, Dr Adam Ussing, and Dr Renee Key.
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Blog
Filtering by Tag: dark matter
"Using dust to constrain dark matter models" - Ussing et al. (2024)
Alan Duffy
My student Adam Ussing show that simulated galaxies, with different dark matter properties can form the same numer of stars but with observable consequences elsewhere in the amount of dust produced… a unique and potentially powerful probe of the nature of dark matter itself.
Read MoreSearching for Dark Matter underground in a gold mine
Alan Duffy
After years of work from teams worldwide, we are finally nearing the completion of the deepest underground physics laboratory in the Southern Hemisphere all searching for dark matter!
So it was a double thrill that I could take one of Australia's biggest shows - Network 10's #TheProjectTV - on a tour of this Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory
Read More"GAMA + KiDS: empirical correlations between halo mass and other galaxy properties near the knee of the stellar-to-halo mass relation" - Taylor et al (2020)
Alan Duffy
My colleague A/Prof Edward ‘Ned’ Taylor did a spectacular job in this monster paper teasing out the connection between properties of the galaxy and its mass… the end result? The dark matter halo mass is more tightly linked to the galaxy’s structure than either the past or current star formation. That means that the stars that make up the galaxies structure are not as relevant as the size of the dark matter halo around it - which traditionally is assumed to play a minor, if any, role in that structure. A wonderful and counterintuitive result, congrats Ned!
Read More"The SABRE project and the SABRE Proof-of-Principle" - Antonello et al. (2019)
Alan Duffy
This is the main collaboration paper for the dual hemisphere dark matter detector project SABRE. It outlines the various efforts underway to reduce contamination of the Sodium-Iodide crystals that react (we hope!) to colliding dark matter particles as well as an active veto system that removes background sources of radiation from our data collection.
Read More"Dark-ages reionization and galaxy formation simulation VIII: Suppressed growth of dark matter haloes during the Epoch of Reionization" - Qin et al. (2017)
Alan Duffy
This is a spectacular study by my Yuxiang Qin, one of my PhD students I am fortunate to co-supervise with Dr Simon Mutch and Prof Stuart Wyithe as part of DRAGONS. In this work Yuxiang compares the growth of dark matter structures in the early universe both with and without the impact of gas physics (in particular the fact that giant clouds of atoms have a pressure that prevents them collapsing unlike dark matter). Most simulations ignore that effect to save computational time. Yuxiang showed that's potentially a disastrous step for first structures where the gas prevents the halo from collapsing and through its gravitational pull can also slow the collapse of dark matter itself meaning simulations that take a computational shortcut can produce early haloes that are far larger than they should otherwise be.
Read MoreTake two on ABC's The Conversation with Richard Fidler
Alan Duffy
I truly adore chatting with Richard, he has an insatiable curiosity and that fact he loves science (astronomy in particular!) means our hour long chat flies by... This time we focussed on the hunt for dark matter with SABRE, the world's first dark matter detector in the Southern Hemisphere, and the science of scifi which films do it well and which don't, I'm looking at you Armageddon.
Read MoreDark Matter detector funded!
Alan Duffy
I’m CI of the dark matter detector SABRE at the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory and can proudly announce that we've been funded by the ARC! Australia will now join an international search for the nature of dark matter as the first site in the Southern Hemisphere.
Read MoreAustralia's dark matter detector - 7's Weekend Sunrise TV
Alan Duffy
Channel 7's Weekend Sunrise had a feature on favourite dark matter detector in the Southern Hemisphere (it's the first and only one so that's an easy choice, as well as being a Co-Investigator which helps!)
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