Seminar by Samuel D. McDermott

Title: New Physics and the Black Hole Mass Gap

The LIGO/Virgo collaboration is making astonishing discoveries at a fantastic pace, including a heavy binary black hole merger with component masses in the “black hole mass gap,” which cannot be explained by standard stellar structure theory. In this talk, I will discuss how new light particles that couple to the Standard Model can act as an additional source of energy loss in the cores of population-III stars, dramatically altering their evolution and potentially explaining mass-gap objects. I will also demonstrate how population catalogs can help distinguish different scenarios for the origin of these objects.