With no discovery of WIMPs to date, attention is turning towards lighter mass (sub eV) candidates for dark matter such as the axion. I will describe work to look for signatures from such light particles in strong gravity environments. In particular, I will explore the idea that they may clump to form relativistic “stars” which can collide with other astrophysical objects such as black holes and neutron stars. I will also discuss the distinctive density patterns that can form by their accretion onto black holes, and how their presence as an additional cooling channel may leave an imprint on neutron star mergers.
Katy is currently a postdoc at the University of Oxford, following on from a PhD at King’s College London and postdoc in Goettingen in Germany. Her research focuses on numerical solutions to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, in cosmological and astrophysical contexts. She is one of the core developers of GRChombo, an open-source code for numerical general relativity simulations.