学术报告—From the cores of neutron stars to the mystery of Dark Matter: Fundamental physics studies with high energy missions

ABSTRACT

There are no doubts that high energy astrophysics has opened new views on the Universe and on the many classes of sources that populates the hot and energetic sky. 

However, in the near future, spectral, timing, and polarimetric observations at high energies are expected to address key scientific questions in fundamental physics. 

In this talk, I will first briefly summarise the potential of high energy astrophysics for physics studies, and then discuss in details two questions: 

− How can we probe the state of baryonic matter at extreme densities, larger than several times the ones in the atomic nuclei, and expected in the cores of neutron stars?

− How can we constrain the properties of the dark matter particle candidate through high energy astrophysics observations?  

Matter inside neutron stars and cosmic objects in which dark matter is thought to cluster, are largely uncharted territories of fundamental physics. 

And so the question is: how current and future high energy space missions could help us to solve those mysteries?

BIO

Professor Andrea Santangelo studied Physics at the University of Palermo in Italy and later specialised in Astrophysics at the Institute of Cosmic Physics of the Italian National Research Council, with Prof. Livio Scarsi, and at Columbia University, New York, with Prof. Robert Novick. Andrea Santangelo is today Professor of High Energy Astrophysics and Director of the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen (Germany).  He has also served as Chairman of the Physics department of the Science Faculty. In 2009 he was granted a RIKEN Grant as distinguished Senior Scientist, while in 2010 he was co-recipient, as member of the HESS collaboration, of the “Bruno Rossi” Prize for the scientific achievements of the HESS Telescope, and in 2007 he was Co-recipient, as member of the HESS collaboration, of the European “Descartes” Prize for the scientific achievements of the HESS Telescope. In 2016 he was granted a CAS President's International Fellowship as Visiting Full Professor at IHEP, and since then he has kept a very close collaboration with IHEP-CAS. He has obtained a second CAS President’s International Fellowship in 2021.

Prof. Santangelo's research interests are in the field of multi-messenger astronomy with focus on High Energy Astrophysics, from a fraction of keV, in the X-rays, to 10^21 eV in the Ultra High Energy Comic rays. He has participated, with leading roles, to many X-ray missions such as BeppoSAX, INTEGRAL, XMM-Newton, eROSITA, ATHENA and now eXTP and THESEUS. He is also leading research for the TeV observatories like HESS and CTA, and in the past, the EUSO program for the search of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays. Among the sources populating the High Energy Sky he likes very much X-ray binaries hosting neutron stars, elusive dark matter, and TeV emitters. Andrea Santangelo has published more than 600 refereed publications in the fields above. 

Inviter: Ji Long