Ethan Baker

I am a graduate student in the Boston University Physics Department advised by Prof. Hongwan Liu. My main research interests lie in anything at the intersection of cosmology and high energy physics. I am especially interested in using under-utilized cosmological and astrophysical datasets to probe the particle nature of dark matter or a larger dark sector.

One example of this approach is a project that I recently completed forecasting the sensitivity of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) to dark photons. Dark photons are a simple, highly-motivated extension to the Standard Model. They are coupled to Standard Model photons through a kinetic mixing term, which causes conversions between visible photons and dark photons. These conversions create new cold patches in the sky, which can be observed by measurements of the sky at radio frequencies. Our work (arXiv:2511.09630 and arXiv:2511.09637) shows that SKA will be highly sensitive to this effect, even more so than highly precise CMB measurements.