Katelin Schutz

Katelin Schutz
NationalityAmerican
EducationPh.D. Berkeley, B.S. MIT
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
InstitutionsMIT, McGill
ThesisSearching for the invisible: how dark forces shape our Universe (2019)
Doctoral advisorHitoshi Murayama
Other academic advisors
Websitehttps://katelinschutz.com/

Katelin Schutz is an American particle physicist known for using cosmological observations to study dark sectors, that is new particles and forces that interact weakly with the visible world. She was a NASA Einstein Fellow[1] and Pappalardo Fellow[2] in the MIT Department of Physics and is currently an assistant professor of physics at McGill University.[3]

The American Physical Society awarded her the Sakurai Dissertation Award in theoretical particle physics in 2020, citing the highly original contributions from her PhD work.[4]

Early life

Schutz grew up in rural western New York in the Finger Lakes region. In 2010, she graduated from Allendale Columbia School.[5]

Career

Schutz attended MIT, where she did research with Max Tegmark,[6] David Kaiser,[7] and Tracy Slatyer.[8] She was awarded a Hertz Fellowship and NSF Fellowship in 2014.[9] She did her PhD with Hitoshi Murayama at UC Berkeley.[4] She completed her thesis in 2019, titled "Searching for the invisible: how dark forces shape our Universe."[10]

Schutz joined McGill University in Montreal as an assistant professor in August 2021 as part of the Centre for High Energy Physics and in the McGill Space Institute.[11]

Research

Schutz studies extensions to the Standard Model of particle physics known as dark matter that might interact only weakly or indirectly with familiar matter made of quarks and leptons. For example, her research asks whether such dark matter particles might experience new forces outside of the Standard Model, and how we might detect such interactions. In particular, such particles would interact with standard matter via gravity, and such interactions may provide a "gravitational portal between dark and visible matter" that we can observe via astronomy, e.g. stars and galaxies, including nearby dwarf galaxies and the Milky Way itself, and also large-scale cosmological structures, such as the CMB, the Lyman-alpha forest, and the cosmological 21 cm line.[12] Schutz and colleagues have pointed out that if dark matter consists of particles that are far lighter than electrons, then particles in the Standard Model could create dark matter through feeble interactions at low temperature known as freeze-in.[13][14][15][16] She has also studied strongly interacting massive particles as a dark matter candidate.[17]

Her research has also identified mechanisms for directly detecting dark matter particles through a two-excitation process in superfluid helium[18][19] as well as for detecting primordial black holes using pulsar timing.[20]

She and her colleagues also simulate galactic halos,[21] and have used data from Gaia to observationally constrained the existence of a dark matter disk in the Milky Way.[22][23]

Awards

As a graduate student, Schutz was a NSF Fellow[9] and Hertz Foundation Fellow.[24] She was named a 2019 Rising Star in physics by the Stanford and MIT Departments of Physics.[25] In 2020 she was the first woman to receive the American Physical Society Sakurai Dissertation Award in theoretical particle physics.[26]

References

  1. ^ "NASA Awards Prize Postdoctoral Fellowships for 2020". NASA. March 25, 2020. Katelin Schutz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dark Sectors in High-Redshift Observations
  2. ^ "Katelin Schutz, Pappalardo Fellow » MIT Physics". MIT Physics. Retrieved 2021-04-06.
  3. ^ "People Detail - Trottier Space Institute at McGill". tsi.mcgill.ca. Retrieved 2024-03-04.
  4. ^ a b "2020 J.J. and Noriko Sakurai Dissertation Award in Theoretical Particle Physics Recipient - Katelin Schutz". American Physical Society. 2020.
  5. ^ "Beyond the Birches - News for the Allendale Columbia School Community" (PDF). Fall 2014. KATELIN SCHUTZ '10 After graduating this spring from MIT, Katelin has continued on to UC Berkeley for a Ph.D. in cosmological phenomenology. For her undergraduate work, she earned four prestigious awards: a Hertz Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Fellowship, an Apker Award, and a Fellowship from UC Berkeley.
  6. ^ Zheng, H.; Tegmark, M.; Buza, V.; Dillon, J. S.; Gharibyan, H.; Hickish, J.; Kunz, E.; Liu, A.; Losh, J.; Lutomirski, A.; Morrison, S. (2014-12-01). "MITEoR: a scalable interferometer for precision 21 cm cosmology". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 445 (2): 1084–1103. arXiv:1405.5527. doi:10.1093/mnras/stu1773. ISSN 0035-8711.
  7. ^ Schutz, Katelin; Sfakianakis, Evangelos I.; Kaiser, David I. (2013-10-30). "Multifield Inflation after Planck: Isocurvature Modes from Nonminimal Couplings". Physical Review D. 89 (6): 064044. arXiv:1310.8285. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.89.064044. hdl:1721.1/89005. S2CID 54016557.
  8. ^ Schutz, Katelin; Slatyer, Tracy R. (2014-09-09). "Self-Scattering for Dark Matter with an Excited State". Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. 2015: 021. arXiv:1409.2867. doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2015/01/021. S2CID 119199238.
  9. ^ a b "NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program Award Recipients, 2014". 2015-06-10. Retrieved 2021-01-18.
  10. ^ Schutz, Katharine (2019-08-29). Searching for the invisible: how dark forces shape our Universe (PhD). UC Berkeley.
  11. ^ "Katelin Schutz". Retrieved 2021-01-12.
  12. ^ Katelin Schutz (March 5, 2020). "Searching for the Invisible – How Dark Forces Shape Our Universe". Simons Foundation.
  13. ^ Katelin Schutz (October 15, 2020). "Making dark matter out of light: the cosmology of sub-MeV freeze-in". Yale University.
  14. ^ "Dark Matter from Light Itself". Hertz Foundation. March 5, 2019.
  15. ^ Dvorkin, Cora; Lin, Tongyan; Schutz, Katelin (2019-02-22). "Making dark matter out of light: freeze-in from plasma effects". Physical Review D. 99 (11): 115009. arXiv:1902.08623. Bibcode:2019PhRvD..99k5009D. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.99.115009. S2CID 119247835.
  16. ^ Dvorkin, Cora; Lin, Tongyan; Schutz, Katelin (2021). "Cosmology of Sub-MeV Dark Matter Freeze-In". Physical Review Letters. 127 (11): 111301. arXiv:2011.08186. Bibcode:2021PhRvL.127k1301D. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.111301. PMID 34558939. S2CID 226976117.
  17. ^ Yonit Hochberg; Eric Kuflik; Robert Mcgehee; Hitoshi Murayama; Katelin Schutz (2018). "Strongly Interacting Massive Particles through the Axion Portal". Physical Review D. 98 (11): 115031. arXiv:1806.10139. Bibcode:2018PhRvD..98k5031H. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.98.115031. S2CID 127399422.
  18. ^ Schutz, Katelin; Zurek, Kathryn M. (2016-09-14). "Detectability of Light Dark Matter with Superfluid Helium". Physical Review Letters. 117 (12): 121302. arXiv:1604.08206. Bibcode:2016PhRvL.117l1302S. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.121302. PMID 27689261. S2CID 36465591.
  19. ^ "Spotting Dark Matter with Supermaterials - Superconducting aluminum or superfluid helium could be used to detect superlight dark matter particles". Physics. 9. American Physical Society. 2016-09-14.
  20. ^ Schutz, Katelin; Liu, Adrian (2017-01-11). "Pulsar timing can constrain primordial black holes in the LIGO mass window". Physical Review D. 95 (2): 023002. arXiv:1610.04234. Bibcode:2017PhRvD..95b3002S. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.95.023002. S2CID 119206621.
  21. ^ Mark Vogelsberger; Jesus Zavala; Katelin Schutz; Tracy Slatyer (April 2019). "Evaporating the Milky Way halo and its satellites with inelastic self-interacting dark matter". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 484 (4). Royal Astronomical Society: 5437–5452. arXiv:1805.03203. Bibcode:2019MNRAS.484.5437V. doi:10.1093/mnras/stz340. hdl:1721.1/127821. S2CID 119449216.
  22. ^ Katelin Schutz; Tongyan Lin; Benjamin R. Safdi; Chih-Liang Wu (2018). "Constraining a Thin Dark Matter Disk with Gaia". Physical Review Letters. 121 (8): 081101. arXiv:1711.03103. Bibcode:2018PhRvL.121h1101S. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.081101. PMID 30192577. S2CID 52175218.
  23. ^ Natalie Wolchover (2017-11-17). "Deathblow Dealt to Dark Matter Disks - New data tracking the movements of millions of Milky Way stars have effectively ruled out the presence of a "dark disk" that could have offered important clues to the mystery of dark matter". Quanta Magazine.
  24. ^ "Hertz Fellow Profile: Katelin Schutz". Retrieved 2021-01-13.
  25. ^ "Rising Stars In Physics 2019". Stanford University. April 10–11, 2019.
  26. ^ "J. J. and Noriko Sakurai Dissertation Award in Theoretical Particle Physics". www.aps.org. Retrieved 2021-04-06.