So far, most attempts to model dark matter have relied on assumptions that may not capture its full behaviour, potentially undermining the constraints that astronomers thought they had already established. For the first time, Dr Tomislav Prokopec at Utrecht University, together with his former master’s student Marco Vecchioni, have developed a framework that treats dark matter as a fully quantum field – building on earlier work showing that gravitational waves in the early universe are similarly unaffected by their quantum surroundings. Their findings suggest that several widely-assumed constraints on dark matter may need to be fundamentally reconsidered. More

This Audio is a summary of the papers ‘Quantum Field Theory Of Cosmological Perturbations Induced By Ultralight Dark Matter,’ https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.27133, and ‘Appearances are deceptive: Can graviton have a mass?’, in Journal of High Energy Physics, https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2025)191

For more information you can contact Dr Tomislav Prokopec at t.prokopec@uu.nl

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