- Fellowship in 2022 at Johns Hopkins University
About Ken Ng’s work
Ken Ng is a physicist studying gravitational waves (GW), particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. He is exploring ways to extend our understanding of the universe, focusing on the nature of dark matter (DM) and high-redshift GW astrophysics.
Ng is searching for ultralight bosons (ULBs), which are promising DM candidates. The measurements of binary black holes' (BBHs) masses and spins provide a new window to explore the properties of ULBs that are unachievable by direct detection. This search utilizes the unique imprints on the distribution of BBH masses and spins left by the interaction between ULBs and BBHs.
Ng will also search for DM subhaloes (DMSHs) and intermediate-mass BHs (IMBHs). Both objects can be gravitational lenses whose sizes are comparable to the wavelengths of GWs, leading to the effect of diffraction in GWs. By characterising the diffraction signatures in the GW data, he will constrain the properties of DMSHs and IMBHs to answer the questions about structure formation in cosmology and the formation of supermassive BHs. He will also investigate the ability of the next-generation GW detectors to trace the evolution of the BH population in the high-redshift Universe, of which the current understanding is limited.
Biography
Ken Ng is now a Miller Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. He obtained a Ph.D. in Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2022, and a BSc in Physics with Honors, First Class, from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2017. He has previously received the Kunkle and Pommerenke Grand Scholarship, the C. N. Yang Scholarship, and Professor Charles Kao's Research Scholarship, at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.