Jorge Terol Calvo

Hi, I'm Jorge

Postdoc in theoretical astroparticle physics · INFN Torino

I try to work out what dark matter is made of. Most of my days go into calculating what we should be seeing in telescopes and underground detectors if one or another idea about dark matter happens to be right, and then checking whether anyone has seen it.

Before Torino I did my PhD at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Tenerife, and I have spent shorter stretches at KIT, LAPTh and Fermilab. I am part of the COSMIC WISPers COST Action and of EuCAPT.

What I work on

Dark matter is about 85% of the matter in the universe and we still do not know what it is. For thirty years the leading candidate was a heavy particle, the WIMP, and an extensive experimental programme has not found it. The field has broadened considerably as a result, and my own work splits about evenly between two of those directions.

Axions and ultralight dark matter

The first is the axion: light enough and weakly enough coupled that detecting one takes considerable ingenuity. A great deal of that effort happens in laboratories; my own approach uses the sky, which offers far more dark matter to work with than any experiment can assemble. Axions should occasionally decay into two photons of equal energy, leaving a narrow line on the astrophysical background wherever dark matter accumulates. I have searched for that line in X-rays, in eROSITA data on the Large Magellanic Cloud, and in the near infrared with SPHEREx. At lower masses still, the axion behaves less like a particle than like a wave filling the galaxy, one that would slowly rotate the polarisation angle of any light passing through it. Pulsars provide highly polarised beams and decades of monitoring, which we have used to search for exactly that effect, first with PPTA and QUIJOTE and later with the European Pulsar Timing Array.

Dark matter and the Standard Model

The second asks what happens when dark matter meets Standard Model particles at high energy. If the two interact at all, then the cosmic rays propagating through the Galaxy are already colliding with the halo: a natural particle beam, energetic enough to leave traces worth looking for. In a recent paper I computed what that implies for neutrinos and recast public ANTARES data to set some of the strongest limits available on light dark matter. The argument also runs in reverse: the most energetic neutrino ever detected crossed a great deal of dark matter on its way to us, so the fact that it arrived at all constrains how strongly the two can interact. Extreme astrophysical environments serve as laboratories too: a supernova that cools too quickly would reveal light dark-sector particles carrying energy away.

Where I started: neutrinos

Earlier in my career I worked mostly on neutrinos themselves: why they have mass at all, what their non-standard interactions imply for physics at much higher energies, and how a neutrino heavy enough for laboratory experiments to detect can still be reconciled with what cosmology allows. I still keep a foot in it, and it feeds into the dark matter work more often than I expect.

A few papers

All 11 papers →

Outside physics

I grew up in l'Olleria, a Valencian town, studied physics in València, and then kept moving: a year in Mainz on Erasmus, four in Tenerife for the PhD, a spring in Karlsruhe, a few weeks in Annecy, a summer in Chicago, and now Torino. Along the way I picked up enough German and Italian to get by, and my French is still a work in progress.

Away from the desk I am usually on a bike. Road cycling is the hobby that has survived every one of those moves, with trail running a close second. I also go to a lot of concerts, mostly local bands singing in Catalan.

Out on a road ride, stopped on a climb with wooded hills behind
Somewhere up a climb
In a hi-vis vest in the access tunnel of the Canfranc Underground Laboratory
Underground at Canfranc, during IDM 2026
Giving a seminar at the Fermilab theory division
Seminar at Fermilab
With the EuCAPT 2023 best poster diploma at CERN
Best poster, EuCAPT at CERN
Visiting the LST1 telescope at La Palma
At the LST1, La Palma
With colleagues at Fermilab
The Fermilab crew

Elsewhere