At the weekly coffee meeting on October 9th (Fri.), Dr. Jeremy Riousset (Florida Institute of Technology) gave a nice description on the properties of "Planetary lightning". After his talk, Dr. Shigehiro Nagataki (Deputy Program Director, iTHEMS) gave an explanation on this year's Nobel Prize in Physics "the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity”.

There are lots of dark matter (DM) candidates of particles and/or non-particles. One important requirement is that DM should be massive. When we consider the main origin of the visible mass in the Universe, it is the proton, i.e. a composite of three-quarks bound by the strong interaction. Then we can realize the DM mass naturally if we introduce similar dynamics in the dark sector. The interaction between the dark and the standard model sector is different from that of DM self-interaction, hence it is also safe under the cosmological requirements.

Among the varieties of composite DM models, the stealth DM scenario is a well-motivated one with minimal assumptions. It is different from other baryonic composite DM since it is developed for solving the problem of DM rather than for another mystery in the standard model. Let's consider the signatures in cosmological observations which we could expect for the stealth DM scenario.

Since the structure of the stealth DM is similar to that of the standard model baryons, they should experience the confined-unconfined phase transition in the early Universe. If the phase transition is of the 1st order, numerous vacuum babbles are produced in the transition from the false- to the true vacuum. The collision of these bubbles sources the low-frequency gravitational waves (GWs) of a ~nHz-mHz range.

However, it is difficult to calculate the physics around the phase transition. Indeed, it is not obvious whether the phase transition occurs in the 1st order or not. When it is of the 1st order, the gravitational wave spectrum is determined using the temperature of the Universe at the phase transition. Dr. Rinaldi and the members of the Lattice Strong Dynamics collaboration have investigated the phase transition in the stealth DM scenario by applying the sophisticated calculation techniques developed for the strongly-interacting sector in the standard model. They reveal that the lower bound of the 1st order phase transition temperature for the scenario, which is then directly converted to the lower bound on the frequency of the GW.

The technique should enable us to study DM from multiple aspects as is shown in this talk. Furthermore, this is the beginning of a new interdisciplinary study in which DM becomes the portal to connect the strong dynamics and GW cosmology, which could further enhance our understanding of this world!

On October 21st, Dr. Christos Merkatas from Aalto University in Finland gave a talk at the iTHEMS Biology Seminar. His talk was entitled, “Bayesian Nonparametric Estimation of Random Dynamical Systems”. Suppose that the observed time series is small, and the noise process is non-Gaussian. How can we reconstruct and predict the behavior of the system? Dr. Merkatas showed that the proposed Bayesian approach enables us to reconstruct and predict the system by inferring the number of unknown components and their variances. According to him, the method can be applied to the problems in physics, biology, and economy. Since some of the audiences including me were not familiar with his method, we asked many basic questions. The talk by Dr. Merkatas was great and also educative. Gen Kurosawa