Guest Lecture: Dr. Pierre Sikivie

Axions and the formation of supermassive black holes at cosmic dawn

Axion dark matter thermalizes by gravitational self-interactions and forms a Bose-Einstein condensate.  It is shown that the rethermalization of the axion fluid during the initial collapse of large-scale overdensities at cosmic dawn transports angular momentum outward sufficiently fast that black holes form.

Speaker info: Dr. Pierre Sikivie is a distinguished professor of physics at the University of Florida. An expert on dark matter and particle physics, his research helped to inspire the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment (ADMX), a collaboration that includes researchers from WashU.