DECam Community Science Workshop 2018: Science Highlights, Coming Opportunities, LSST Synergies

May 21-22, 2018 • Tucson, Arizona

Talk Abstracts

DECam Microlensing Studies of Intermediate Mass Black Holes [3.48 MB PDF]

William Dawson

The discovery of gravitational waves from merging intermediate mass black holes
(IMBHs) by LIGO is arguably among the most important scientific discoveries of
the 21st century. The current rate of LIGO events favors such a large abundance
that IMBHs (15-10^5 Msun) would make up the majority of dark matter (DM). We will discuss our ongoing DECam microlensing survey to search for similar IMBHs in our Milky Way. This is one of the select projects recommended by the DOE Cosmic Visions: New Ideas in Dark Matter report. While past microlensing surveys have only been efficient below 10 Msun, we are using paralensing as a means of surpassing this previous limitation. By carefully designing this survey we will enable the detection of these intermediate mass black holes based on their parallax microlensing signal, and thus enable this and future surveys to be sensitive to black holes in the Milky Way > 10 Msun. This survey will also open the door to precise mass measurements of individual black holes through follow-up observations of the complementary astrometric microlensing signal.

Authors: Will Dawson, Mark Ammons, Tim Axelrod, George Chapline, Agnieszka Cieplak, Alex Drlica-Wagner, Nathan Golovich, Jessica Lu, Michael Schneider, & Anja von der Linden