The Vanderbilt Initiative for Gravity, Waves, and Fluids is an interdisciplinary research venture providing mathematicians, physicists, and astrophysicists with the resources and space to connect and collaboratively work on problems of outstanding scientific merit, such as:

• General relativity: theoretical, mathematical, numerical, or experimental, including, but not restricted to, black holes, gravitational radiation, and multimessenger astrophysics.
• Fluid mechanics: theoretical, mathematical, numerical, or experimental, including, but not restricted to, relativistic fluids far from equilibrium.
• Evolution of partial differential equations related to fluids and gravity, including, but not restricted to, the geometric analysis of waves and fluids.
• The physics and mathematics of neutron star mergers and high-energy nuclear collisions.

VandyGRAF Seminar Series

All VandyGRAF talks will take place in the Chapel in the 17th&Horton building, unless indicated below.

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Harikrishnan Ramani, University of Delaware

Friday, September 25, 2026

Did LZ detect an electroweak WIMP?

Abstract: The LZ collaboration has reported a single 248 keV nuclear recoil in a search extended beyond the usual WIMP window. A TeV-scale electroweak WIMP scattering inelastically through the Z, of which the Higgsino is the canonical example, produces exactly this signature when its neutral mass splitting lies in the 100s of keV range. I will argue that neutrino annihilation in the sun as constrained by IceCube is a decisive probe of this interpretation. For a thermal Higgsino this excludes splittings below about 570 keV, well above those that fit the event. The interpretation can nonetheless survive if the local high-velocity tail is faster than the standard halo or if higher electroweak multiplets are invoked. That surviving region is testable by heavy-element paleo-detectors and by large neutrino detectors supplemented with lead or uranium, in which the up-scattered dark matter de-excites into a photon. 

Khwahish Kushwah, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil

Friday, October 2, 2026

Roman Berens, University of Illinois

Friday October 16, 2026

Gilbert Weinstein, Ariel University, Israel

Thursday, October 8, 2026

Daniel D’Orazio, Niels Bohr Institute, Denmark

Friday, November 6, 2026

William Wolf, University of Oxford, UK

Friday, December 4, 2026

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