Brown Bag Seminar | Exploring the dark side in the era of Roman

Gravitational microlensing is one of the most sensitive methods we have to search for macroscopic dark matter. NASA’s upcoming Roman Space Telescope will dramatically advance this search by performing a comprehensive microlensing survey of the Galactic Bulge at sensitivities orders of magnitude stronger than existing telescopes. Its unprecedented sensitivity will provide the opportunity to search for dark matter across a wide range of unexplored parameter space; however, it will also pose new challenges, including an irreducible astrophysical background in the form of free-floating planets. In this talk, I will discuss how population-level modeling can help mitigate this background and open the potential for Roman to make a first discovery of macroscopic dark matter in our galaxy.