Abstract

The fundamental nature of dark matter remains a challenging mystery for the ΛCDM model. No experiment or observation has yet made a confirmed direct detection of dark matter, which motivates the wider exploration of dark matter parameter space, including sub-GeV particle masses. In this talk, I will introduce and motivate a new project I am working on with Prof. Kimberly Boddy in the physics department and Dr. Tanvi Karwal, KICP Fellow at the University of Chicago, to constrain dark matter interactions with baryons from observations of the cosmic microwave background. To avoid prior volume effects, we will use a frequentist method to obtain 2-dimensional profile likelihood model constraints.