About me

I’m a staff scientist in the Multimessenger Astronomy Group at Ruhr University Bochum. I specialize in gamma-ray astronomy. Currently, I’m a member of the VERITAS collaboration and the CTAO Consortium. I am also leading the project Dark100, funded by an ERC consolidator grant. See below for more details about Dark100.

Dark100

Dark100 is focused on one of the most important questions in astrophysics and cosmology: the nature of dark matter. Minor extensions to the simplest dark matter picture favor a dark matter particle mass above ~100 TeV. Dark100 will probe the velocity-weighted annihilation cross section for dark matter particles in this underexplored mass range, between 100 TeV and tens of PeV, testing several classes of dark matter models.

Dark100 will accomplish this goal by deploying a novel, cost-effective array of remotely operated semi-off-the-shelf Fresnel telescopes, developed by the PANOSETI group at University of California, San Diego. The easily deployable, movable telescopes represent a new paradigm in ground-based gamma-ray astronomy above 10 TeV. An array of ten telescopes will be deployed for Dark100, enabling unprecedentedly deep and resolved pointed observations of the gamma-ray sky in this energy range and demonstrating the potential of these telescopes for Cherenkov astronomy in the 10 TeV - 1 PeV range.

The combination of recent theoretical interest in this underexplored dark matter mass range, technological developments enabling its exploration, and synergies with recently deployed (LHAASO) and soon-to-be deployed (CTA) gamma-ray instruments make it an exciting moment for this project!