| Abstract: |
Gravitational microlensing provides one of our strongest probes of dark matter substructure in the sub-stellar mass range. Decades of ground-based observations have placed strong constraints on dark matter throughout this parameter space while simultaneously offering a tantalizing hint of a new, unexplored population of dark objects at intermediate masses. To fully characterize the nature of these events requires a level of precision and a photometric baseline that has, to date, been unachievable from Earth. But with the September 2026 launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA’s next flagship mission, we will enter a new era for microlensing: the era of space-based surveys. Roman's wide field of view and unprecedented photometric precision will make its five-year time domain survey the single most sensitive microlensing survey ever performed. In this talk, I will discuss the discovery prospects for Roman’s campaign, its synergies with ground-based observatories like LSST and Subaru, and the work I am performing as a chief architect of Roman’s short-duration microlensing pipeline to enable these discoveries.
|
