Probing the Particle Nature of Dark Matter with Strong Gravitational Lensing

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The nature of dark matter remains one of the most important outstanding questions in cosmology, with the potential to reveal fundamental physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, resulting in giant leaps in our understanding of the natural world. It is well understood that the microphysics of the dark matter particle impacts its clustering properties on different scales. The most widely accepted dark matter model, cold dark matter, has had tremendous success explaining the large-scale structure of the universe. However, it has faced many challenges for its predictions of the distribution of matter on small, sub-galactic scales, with some observations seemingly favoring a warm dark matter alternative. A definitive answer to this question can only be achieved by mapping the distribution of dark matter on small scales with a purely gravitational probe. Strong gravitational lensing - the formation of multiple images of distant sources due to the deflection of their light rays by the gravity of intervening structures - is the only probe capable of doing this at cosmological distances. The goal of the proposed research program is to use gravitational lensing, world's most powerful telescopes, and artificial intelligence to quantify the abundance of dark matter subhalos in distant galaxies to measure the temperature of the dark matter particle.