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Benjamin Lillard

Benjamin Lillard — Assistant Research Professor — Postdoc
Office: 206B Osmond Laboratory
Address: 104 Davey Laboratory, State College, PA 16801
blillard@psu.edu
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Benjamin Lillard
Physics Dark Matter Gravitational Waves Physical Mathematics IGC

Dark matter accounts for most of the mass in the observed universe: what is it, and how does it interact with our kind of matter? Does the Standard Model of particle physics descend from a more fundamental theory, and are there dynamical explanations for the values of its parameters? And why, given the close symmetry between matter and antimatter in the Standard Model, did the universe become dominated by matter in its first moments? My current research is focused on accelerating the search for dark matter in Earth-bound laboratories, using molecular crystals to test whether the dark matter interacts with electrons, neutrons or protons.

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ORCID: 0000-0001-8496-4808

Publications
  1. Benjamin Lillard “Wavelet-harmonic integration methods.” Phys. Rev. D 111 12 (2025) doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.111.123006
  2. Benjamin Lillard “Partial Rate Matrix for Dark Matter Scattering.” Phys. Rev. Lett. 134 22 (2025) doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.221003
  3. Nicolas Fernandez, Joshua Foster, Benjamin Lillard, Jessie Shelton “Stochastic Gravitational Waves from Early Structure Formation.” Phys. Rev. Lett. 133 11 (2024) doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.111002
  4. Patrick Draper, Benjamin Lillard, Carissa Skye “Neutralizing topological obstructions to bubbles of nothing.” JHEP 10 (2023) doi:10.1007/JHEP10(2023)049
  5. Carlos Blanco, Ian Harris, Yonatan Kahn, Benjamin Lillard, Jesús Pérez-Ríos “Molecular Migdal effect.” Phys. Rev. D 106 11 (2022) doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.106.115015
  6. Benjamin Lillard “Confinement on the moose lattice.” JHEP 11 (2022) doi:10.1007/JHEP11(2022)125
  7. Carlos Blanco, Yonatan Kahn, Benjamin Lillard, Samuel McDermott “Dark Matter Daily Modulation With Anisotropic Organic Crystals.” Phys. Rev. D 104 (2021) doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.104.036011
  8. Carlos Blanco, J. Collar, Yonatan Kahn, Benjamin Lillard “Dark Matter-Electron Scattering from Aromatic Organic Targets.” Phys. Rev. D 101 5 (2020) doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.101.056001
  9. Benjamin Lillard, Tim Tait “A High Quality Composite Axion.” JHEP 11 (2018) doi:10.1007/JHEP11(2018)199
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.