Chris Cappiello

Queen's University

Postdoctoral Fellow - Particle Astrophysics

About

I am a postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s University, where I’m a member of the Department of Physics, Engineering Physics, and Astronomy, as well as the Arthur B. McDonald Canadian Astroparticle Physics Research Institute. I received my PhD in 2021 from the Ohio State University, where I worked with John Beacom on the phenomenology of strongly interacting dark matter.

My research focuses on finding novel ways to probe the particle nature of dark matter. I’m particularly interested in alternatives to the standard WIMP scenario. If dark matter is too light, it may have evaded detection by simply not carrying enough energy for experiments to see it. However, energetic phenomena like supernova explosions and cosmic rays could upscatter such particles to high velocity, enabling their detection. I’ve worked with both theorists and experimental collaborations to constrain light dark matter using supernovae and cosmic rays.

On the other hand, dark matter could be very heavy, but so strongly interacting that it gets stopped before reaching a detector, or so rare that it almost never passes through detectors at all. I’m interested in dark matter propagation in the Earth and astrophysical probes of heavy dark matter, as well as model building for composite dark matter states and gravitationally bound structures.

A list of my publications can be found on inspire.