Skip to main content

Carlos Blanco

Carlos Blanco — Assistant Professor of Physics — Faculty
Office: 303K Osmond Laboratory
Address: 4575 Pollock Rd, State College, PA 16801
carlosblanco@psu.edu
+1 814 865 7533
Carlos Blanco
ICDS Physics Cosmic Rays Dark Matter Multimessenger Astrophysics Neutrinos CFT CMA CTOC IGC

Research Summary

The central concern of my research is the search for physics beyond the Standard Model in general, and in specific the detection of dark matter. I'm interested in direct and indirect probes of dark matter from astrophysical to bench-top scales. My research is primarily theoretical, but straddles the boundaries with computational and experimental physics.

Research Interests

-Direct and indirect detection of dark matter
-Material science with machine learning
-High-energy astrophysics
-Particle phenomenology

Visit my website

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8971-834X

Publications
  1. Antonio Capanema, Carlos Blanco “-Cascade V4: A semi-analytical code for modeling cosmological gamma-ray propagation.” Comput. Phys. Commun. 307 (2025) doi:10.1016/j.cpc.2024.109408
  2. Carlos Blanco, Ian Harris, Yonatan Kahn, Anirudh Prabhu “Constraining dark matter-proton scattering from molecular cloud ionization.” Phys. Rev. D 110 3 (2024) doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.110.035006
  3. Carlos Blanco, Oindrila Ghosh, Sunniva Jacobsen, Tim Linden “Axion-like particles as a solution to an emerging tension in the TeV gamma-ray sky.” PoS ICRC2023 (2024) doi:10.22323/1.444.1446
  4. Carlos Blanco, Rebecca Leane “Search for Dark Matter Ionization on the Night Side of Jupiter with Cassini.” Phys. Rev. Lett. 132 26 (2024) doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.261002
  5. Carlos Blanco, Rebecca Leane, Marianne Moore, Joshua Tong “Search for Dark Matter Induced Airglow in Planetary Atmospheres.” (2024)
  6. Cameron Cook, Carlos Blanco, Juri Smirnov “Deep learning optimal molecular scintillators for dark matter direct detection.” (2024)
  7. Carlos Blanco, Rouven Essig, Marivi Fernandez-Serra, Harikrishnan Ramani, Oren Slone “Dark matter direct detection with quantum dots.” Phys. Rev. D 107 9 (2023) doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.107.095035
  8. Sandip Roy, Carlos Blanco, Christopher Dessert, Anirudh Prabhu, Tea Temim “Sensitivity of JWST to eV-Scale Decaying Axion Dark Matter.” (2023)
  9. 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
  10. 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
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.