Karen Macías Cárdenas (she/they)

I am a Doctoral INPhINIT Fellow at the Instituto de Física Teórica (IFT) in Madrid. I was previously at Queen's High Energy and Astroparticle Theory group (QHEAT) in Canada, where I graduated my Master's at the end of 2022. I obtained my B.Sc. in Physics from the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California (UABC) in Mexico in 2020.

I am very proud of being a latinx, queer, and neurodivergent scientist. Therefore, is important to me to bring forward the needs of minority groups in STEM.

Publications

Boxed in from all sides: a global fit to loopy dark matter and neutrino masses.

Authors: Karen Macías Cárdenas, Gopolang Mohlabeng and Aaron Vincent.

We investigate a dark matter model that couples to the standard model through a one-loop interaction with neutrinos, where the mediator particles also generate neutrino masses. We perform a global fit that incorporates dark matter relic abundance, primordial nucleosynthesis, neutrino mass, collider and indirect detection constraints.

Thanks to the loop suppression, large couplings are allowed, and we find that the model parameters are constrained on all sides. Dark matter masses from 10 MeV to a few TeV are allowed, but sub-GeV masses are preferred for the model to also account for the heaviest neutrino mass. Though our results are valid for a single neutrino mass eigenstate at a time, the model and methods are generalizable to the full 3-flavor case.

Presentations

Dark matter, neutrino masses, and queer science.

Flavourful Physics Workshop

Outreach and Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI)

Flavourful Physics Workshop

Organized by the Commission for Equality and Diversity (CID) at IFIC

February 3rd, 2025. Valencia, Spain.

November 18th: a call for LGBTQIA+ rights in STEM

Roundtable organized by the Out in Space group of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Commission for Women and Astronomy of the Spanish Astronomical Society (SEA)

November 22nd, 2024. Madrid, Spain.

Clubes de Ciencia Mexico 2024

My students doing their final presentation for the course "Astronomical experiments: the universe is your laboratory"

August 4-11th, 2024. Ensenada, Mexico.