About
Professor Safdi’s research focuses on understanding dark matter. There is around five times more dark matter than ordinary matter in our Universe, but it is completely unknown at present how dark matter fits in with the rest of the known particles and forces. Safdi works at the intersection of theoretical and experimental efforts to probe the particle nature of dark matter. His main focus is to develop new ways of connecting the many theoretical ideas that exist for what dark matter might be with data in order to inform our knowledge of what the mysterious dark matter is. Some of Safdi’s work utilizes cosmic ray observations to search for rare astrophysical signatures that could harbor clues to the nature of dark matter. Other aspects of his work involve efforts to detect rare interactions of dark matter with ordinary matter on Earth. Safdi recently proposed a novel method for detecting a hypothetical dark matter candidate called the axion, which has lead to new experimental efforts.
Selected Publications
The Dark Matter Interpretation of the 3.5-keV Line is Inconsistent with Blank-Sky Observations, (Christopher Dessert, Nicholas L. Rodd,
Benjamin R. Safdi), Science 367, 6485 (2020).
γ-Ray Constraints on Decaying Dark Matter and Implications for IceCube, (Timothy Cohen, Kohta Murase, Nicholas L. Rodd, Benjamin R. Safdi, Yotam Soreq), Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 021102 (2017).
Broadband and Resonant Approaches to Axion Dark Matter Detection, (Yonatan Kahn, Benjamin R. Safdi, Jesse Thaler), Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 141801 (2016).
Evidence for Unresolved γ-Ray Point Sources in the Inner Galaxy, (Samuel K. Lee, Mariangela Lisanti, Benjamin R. Safdi, Tracy R. Slatyer, Wei Xue), Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 051103 (2016).
Modulation Effects in Dark Matter-Electron Scattering Experiments, (Samuel K. Lee, Mariangela Lisanti, Siddharth Mishra-Sharma, Benjamin R. Safdi), Phys. Rev. D 92, 083517 (2015).