Research

Overview

My research spans theoretical particle physics (dark matter and physics beyond the Standard Model), experimental particle physics (machine learning at the Large Hadron Collider), and astronomy (time-series analysis of infrared survey data).

Undergraduate Research

As an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, I worked first in the experimental particle physics group of Petar Maksimovic. I used boosted decision trees and other machine learning techniques to help distinguish background and signal processes at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

I next worked in the group of Nadia Zakamska. We used time-series analysis techniques on a large dataset from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) to identify over 40,000 short-period (i.e. P < 1 day) binary stars. We also introduced new, less-computationally-intensive methods to identify periodic variables (paper).

PhD Research

As a PhD student at the University of Michigan, my research was in the field of particle phenomenology. My advisor was Aaron Pierce.

Projects:

  • Dark Photon and Precision Electroweak Analysis: Explored the impact that an electroweak-scale dark photon would have on the precision electroweak fit (paper).

  • Dark Sink Dark Matter: Studied a modification to the typical freeze-in paradigm that allows for larger couplings to the Standard Model (paper). I contributed to the public code that accompanied this paper.

  • Singlet-Doublet (WIMP) Dark Matter: Studied a paradigmatic model of a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) and charted out the remaining parameter space (paper).

  • Early-Universe Dark Sectors: Recently, I have been thinking a lot about early universe scenarios where the dark sector and standard model decouple in new and interesting ways.

Publications

  1. E. Petrosky, Extending the Standard Model: Dark Photons, Dark Sinks, and Singlet-Doublet Dark Matter, PhD thesis, University of Michigan (2026). doi:10.7302/dspace/29548
  2. P. N. Bhattiprolu, E. Petrosky, A. Pierce, “Singlet-doublet dark matter revisited,” Phys. Rev. D 112 (2025). arXiv:2505.11607
  3. P. N. Bhattiprolu, R. McGehee, E. Petrosky, A. Pierce, “Sub-MeV Dark Sink Dark Matter,” Phys. Rev. D 111, 035027 (2025). arXiv:2408.07744
  4. K. Harigaya, E. Petrosky, A. Pierce, “Precision Electroweak Tensions and a Dark Photon,” JHEP 07 (2024) 201. arXiv:2307.13045
  5. E. Petrosky, H.-C. Hwang, N. L. Zakamska, V. Chandra, M. J. Hill, “Variability, periodicity and contact binaries in WISE,” MNRAS 503 (2021). arXiv:2012.04690

Full records are on INSPIRE-HEP and Google Scholar.

Technical Skills

See Skills & Code.