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Johannes Herms, Sudip Jana, Vishnu P.K. and Shaikh Saad. Photos provided by Dr. Sudip Jana.

Dark matter: OSU Department of Physics alumnus' and doctoral student’s research celebrated

Friday, September 2, 2022

Media Contact: Elizabeth Gosney | CAS Manager of Marketing and Communications | 405-744-7497 | egosney@okstate.edu

Dr. Sudip Jana, an OSU physics doctoral alumnus and postdoctoral theoretical physics researcher at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, Germany, and Vishnu P.K., a current doctoral student in physics at OSU, along with two other collaborators had their research accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters

Jana and Vishnu P.K. collaborated with Johannes Herms of Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, Germany and Shaikh Saad of the Department of Physics, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland. Their research focuses on a novel dark matter (DM) model with favorable implications for defining the presently unrecognized component of the universe — the finding of such a method can advance the knowledge of the universe.  

“The DM mass is predicted to be very close to the mass of the leptons, which can potentially be identified from DM annihilation into gamma-rays,” Jana said. “We show that the phenomenon of neutrino oscillations is inherently connected to the observed relic abundance of DM. New physics involved in our framework lies at or below the electroweak scale, making it testable at upcoming colliders, beam-dump experiments, and future sub-GeV gamma-ray telescopes. This will greatly interest the particle and astroparticle physics community.”

Jana said that since he did his doctoral work in theoretical physics at OSU under Dr. K.S. Babu, Regents Professor and theoretical physicist, the Department of Physics has played a substantial role in his research career. Jana has continued collaborating with colleges at OSU and supervising and mentoring several graduate students — one being Vishnu P.K.  

“The guidance provided by Dr. Babu and several advanced courses offered by the department prepared me to participate in research at an early stage of my graduate study,” Vishnu P.K. said. “I was fortunate to have good support from my senior colleagues; they guided and collaborated with me on several research projects. Dr. Jana and I have collaborated on 10 research articles published in well-known peer-reviewed journals, including the current article.”

The Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, Germany, and the OSU high energy physics group have built a robust research collaboration. Jana said he has a strong attachment to OSU’s Department of Physics. 

“The students and alumni of OSU are doing cutting-edge research in theoretical physics and publishing their research in top peer-reviewed journals, which can inspire current and upcoming students,” Jana said. “This research article is about light thermal dark matter, which constitutes a whopping one-fourth of the universe’s energy budget.”

Story By: Kelli Leech, CAS graduate student | kelli.leech@okstate.edu

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