Title:Probing the Wave Nature of Light New Physics

Speaker:Chen Sun (HIAS-UCAS)

Time: 2026-05-14 14：00

Venue: Room W206, Physics Building

Abstract:Many well-motivated UV theories contain bosonic light degrees of freedom, which can exhibit various wave-like behaviors at low energy. This leads to many new ideas and novel observables in recent years to probe new physics in astrophysical and laboratory setups alike. In this talk, I will briefly review a few examples in leveraging the wave-like features to test axions and ultralight dark matter. These include the axion-induced supernova remnant radio echo, the soliton-imprinted galaxy rotation curves, and axion-induced neutron star X-ray signals. I will end with a new axion-photon resonant conversion mechanism induced by spatially varying magnetic field background and show its phenomenological consequences to the LSTW experiments and solar axion searches.

Bio：Chen Sun is currently an Associate Scientist at HIAS-UCAS. Chen received his PhD from Virginia Tech, under the supervision of Tatsu Takeuchi. He then has worked as a full-time postdoctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP Trieste), before joining HIAS-UCAS in 2026. As a theorist, he works at the intersection of cosmology, astrophysics, and high energy physics, with a focus on wave-like new physics beyond the standard model of elementary particle physics -- including axion, dark photon, ultralight dark matter -- and their imprints in cosmological and astrophysical channels.