Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

1. Dark Matter Astrophysics and Cosmology

Ming-chung Chu:

I will briefly introduce our research works on dark matter astrophysics and cosmology, which can be divided into 2 inter-related areas. I. We have been studying admixture of dark matter in compact stars and their observational consequences. In particular, we find that anomalous white dwarfs, neutron stars, and subluminous Type IA  supernovae can be produced by a small amount of dark matter admixture. We are currently investigating observational signals of dark matter accumulated near supermassive black holes by the growth of the latter.  II. We find that allowing for a finite neutrino chemical potential resolves the tension of the Hubble constant value between cosmic microwave background and local measurements. We are studying the effects of the partial degeneracy of cosmological neutrinos, as well as their masses, on structure formation and evolution.

2. High Energy Physics at CUHK
Luis Roberto Flores Castillo:

After the discovery of the Higgs Boson, announced on July 4, 2012, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN underwent major upgrades to increase significantly its center-of-mass energy, from 8 TeV to 13 TeV. The new data-taking period, now under way, will allow a more detailed study of the Higgs boson and many searches for new high-mass states. I will briefly describe some of these efforts, with emphasis on recent experimental results obtained with the participation of Hong Kong institutions in the ATLAS collaboration.

3. GW150914: Dawn of Gravitational-wave Astronomy
Tjonnie G. F. LI

On 14 September 2015, Advanced LIGO, two state-of-the-art kilometre-scale interferometric detectors, recorded the first ever gravitational-wave detection. GW150914, the signal of a binary black hole merger, marks the start of gravitational-wave astronomy. I will present the latest results from the first observing run of Advanced LIGO and what we have learned from it.

 4. The Link between Magnetic Fields and Star Formation: Recent Progress in CUHK

Hua-bai LI

In CUHK, a small group of us has started probing the role of B-fields in star formation since 2013; I will report the progress so far. We observed that B-fields have decisive effects on cloud shapes, fragmentation and star formation rate; none of these has ever been reported before. With this background, we also performed numerical experiments, studying why there still exist observations that are interpreted as evidence of weak fields. I will also briefly introduce our
instrumentation plan - the ASTE Polarimeter.