Davide Racco

Research Interests

I am interested in topics at the crossover between Particle Physics and Cosmology.
In particular, my main area of interest is Dark Matter, and I have worked on various classes of candidates, ranging from WIMPs (particles with masses and interaction strengths comparable to the Standard Model particles, who are currently the target of many experimental searches) to Primordial Black Holes (hypothetical black holes that could have formed in the early history of the Universe).
I have also worked on the metastability of the Higgs potential: if we extrapolate to high energies the predictions of the Standard Model, the electroweak vacuum of the Standard Model appears to be a metastable minimum of the potential. The fact that we live nonetheless in that vacuum today has important implications for the history of the early Universe, and the interplay between Particle Physics and Cosmology can shed light on physics at very high energy scales. As potential observational signatures, I have studied the generation of Primordial Black Holes, of a stochastic background of Gravitational Waves, and a peculiar imprint on the correlation functions of Large Scale Structures.

Positions Held

• 2014 - 2018 Department of Theoretical Physics, University of Geneva PhD student

Awards

• Prix Vacheron-Constantin for the best PhD thesis in Physics of the University of Geneva in 2018. Award: watch Vatcheron-Constantin
• Buchalter Cosmology Prize 2018, First Prize, 10 000 USD split among the three authors (J. R. Espinosa, D. Racco, A. Riotto) of the paper "Cosmological Signature of the Standard Model Higgs Vacuum Instability: Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter", Phys. Rev. Lett. 120 (2018) no.12, 121301, arXiv:1710.11196.

Recent Publications

• G. Franciolini, G. F. Giudice, D. Racco and A. Riotto, Implications of the detection of primordial gravitational waves for the Standard Model, JCAP 1905 (2019) no.05, 022, arXiv: 1811.08118 [hep-ph]
• N. Bartolo, V. De Luca, G. Franciolini, M. Peloso, D. Racco and A. Riotto, Testing primordial black holes as dark matter with LISA, Phys. Rev. D 99 (2019) no.10, 103521, arXiv: 1810.12224 [astro-ph.CO]
• A. Hook, J. Huang and D. Racco, Minimal signatures of the Standard Model in non-Gaussianities, arXiv: 1908.00019 [hep-ph].
• A. Hook, J. Huang and D. Racco, Searches for other vacua II: A new Higgstory at the cosmological collider, arXiv: 1907.10624 [hep-ph].

Seminars

• Stochastic backgrounds of Gravitational Waves as an evidence of Primordial Black Holes, Conference "Next Frontiers in the Search for Dark Matter", Galileo Galilei Institute, Firenze (Italy)
• Stochastic backgrounds of Gravitational Waves as an evidence of Primordial Black Holes, Conference Cosmo19, RWTH Aachen University (Germany)
• Cosmological signatures of the SM Higgs instability: Primordial Black Holes and Gravitational Waves, TRIUMF (Canada)
• Cosmological signatures of the SM Higgs instability: Primordial Black Holes and Gravitational Waves, University of Victoria (Canada)
• Cosmological signatures of the SM Higgs instability: Primordial Black Holes and Gravitational Waves, Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics (USA)
• Cosmological signatures of the SM Higgs instability: Primordial Black Holes and Gravitational Waves, SISSA (Italy)
• PIRSA:18100099, Theoretical Models for Dark Matter: from WIMPs to Primordial Black Holes, 2018-10-26, Particle Physics