Discovering New Physics in the Early Universe

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Abstract
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Cosmology and particle astrophysics are entering a golden age of precision measurements. Over the next decade, a wealth of new data will give us our sharpest view yet of physics beyond our standard models, including the identity of dark matter, one of the biggest open questions in physics today. In this talk, I will describe three ways my research program aims to turn that data into discovery: 1) quantifying how new physics leaves imprints on cosmic history; 2) proposing and testing well-motivated particle models of dark matter to explain experimental anomalies; and 3) developing the computational and statistical methods — increasingly with the help of AI — that make such searches possible.

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About the Speaker
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Dr Hongwan Liu is the Cecile K. Dalton Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics at Boston University. He is an astroparticle physicist and cosmologist working at the intersection of theory, computation, and data to discover new physics. He received his PhD from MIT in 2019, then held a joint postdoctoral appointment at Princeton and NYU's Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics. In 2023, he was jointly appointed as a fellow at the University of Chicago's Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, and as the David N. Schramm Fellow in Theoretical Astrophysics at Fermilab. He then joined the BU faculty in 2024.