Francis-Yan Cyr-Racine

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM. My research focuses on dark matter, gravitational lensing, neutrinos, and cosmology, with an emphasis on their relation with particle physics. My main research interests are listed to the right. Click on the Research section for more details. Before coming to UNM, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the High-energy theory group of Harvard University , and before that, I was a W.M. Keck Institute for Space Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at the California Institute of Technology.

Dark Matter forms about 85% of all the matter in the Universe, but we still do not know what it is made of. Does it interact at all with the matter that you and I are made of? Does it interact with itself? How can we constrain its particle properties through astrophysical observations? These are the kind of questions that my research is answering.

Since it it sensitive to all the mass distributed through the Universe, gravitational lensing is an ideal tool to map the distribution of dark matter on the smallest scales where important clues about the its particle nature may lie hidden. I am actively developing new statistical techniques aimed at probing small-scale structure using gravitational lenses.

Neutrinos are arguably the less constrained particles in the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Since they interact very weakly with ordinary matter, it is difficult to study their properties. However, right after the Big-Bang the Universe was dense and hot, allowing the neutrino to strongly interact with their surrounding. By studying this epoch through cosmic microwave background (CMB) data, we can probe their interactions and compare them with what we expect from the Standard Model