Dark Energy

Direct detection of dark energy: The XENON1T excess and future prospects

We explore the prospects for direct detection of dark energy by current and upcoming terrestrial dark matter direct detection experiments. If dark energy is driven by a new light degree of freedom coupled to matter and photons then dark energy quanta …

Can we detect dark energy in the lab?

Last year (June 2020), there has been a lot of excitement and speculation around the excess reported by the XENON-1T collaboration, which could be attributed to new physics such as the axion. I recently worked on the bold idea that a specific model of dark energy could have caused such an excess.

Dark Energy

Measurements of supernovae distances first showed that the expansion rate of the Universe is accelerating. This finding is consistent with the idea that a large part of the energy of the Universe is stored into dark energy. Further evidences from surveys of distant galaxies and from gravitational lensing corroborates this interpretation.

Late time transitions in the quintessence field and the H0 tension

We consider a quintessence field which transitions from a matter-like to a cosmological constant behaviour between recombination and the present time. We aim at easing the tension in the measurement of the present Hubble rate, and we assess the …

Cosmological window onto the string axiverse and the supersymmetry breaking scale

The low-energy limit of several string theories feature the axiverse, a plethora of light axions with masses spanning various orders of magnitude. Within the simplest picture, the masses of the resulting axions depend on a hard non-perturbative scale …