Souvik Jana

Postdoc in Prof. Otto Hannuksela’s Gravitational Wave group

📍 Office No. G29 G/F, Department of Physics, CUHK, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong

✉️ Email: souvik.jana@cuhk.edu.hk | souvikjana445@gmail.com

Research interests

Strong Lensing Cosmography

Gravitational wave strong lensing produces multiple observable copies of signals arriving at different times. With third-generation detectors expected to detect thousands of lensed events, I develop Bayesian methods to extract cosmological parameters from the number of lensed events and their time delay distributions.

Strong Lensing of Gravitational Waves as a Probe of Nature of Dark Matter

Strong lensing of gravitational waves can reveal the nature of dark matter particles. Light (warm or fuzzy) dark matter suppresses low-mass halo formation, reducing lensed events with small time delays. By analyzing the distribution of lensed events and time delays, we can constrain warm dark matter (mWDM) and fuzzy dark matter (mψ) particle masses with unprecedented precision—significantly tighter than existing constraints.

Multi-Messenger Lensing

Combining gravitational wave observations with electromagnetic counterparts in lensed systems opens new avenues for precision cosmology and fundamental physics. This multi-messenger approach enables cross-validation of lensing signatures and provides complementary information about lens properties and cosmological parameters.

Probing Populations of Massive and Supermassive Black Holes Using Multibanding Observations

Future space-based detectors like LISA combined with ground-based observatories will enable multibanding observations of massive black hole binaries. By observing the same source across different frequency bands, we can probe the population properties, formation channels, and evolution of massive and supermassive black holes across cosmic time.

Employment

  • 2025-Present Postdoc, Department of Physics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Education

  • 2019-2025 Ph.D., International Centre For Theoretical Sciences (ICTS-TIFR), Bengaluru, India
    Advisor: P. Ajith (ICTS-TIFR)
    Co-advisor: Tejaswi Venumadhav (UCSB, USA)
  • 2017-2019 M.Sc. Physics, School of Physical Sciences, JNU, New Delhi, India
  • 2014-2017 B.Sc. (Hons.) Physics, Siksha-Bhavana (Institute of Science), Visva-Bharati University, West Bengal, India

    Publications

    Selected Publications

    • Cosmography Using Strongly Lensed Gravitational Waves from Binary Black Holes (Physical Review Letters, Editor’s Choice) doi (S. Jana et al. 2023)
    • Strong-lensing cosmography using third-generation gravitational-wave detectors (Classical and Quantum Gravity, invited Focus Issue on XG Detectors) doi (S. Jana et al. 2024)
    • Probing the nature of dark matter using strongly lensed gravitational waves from binary black holes (accepted in Physical Review Letters) doi (S. Jana et al. 2025)

    Please refer to my INSPIRE page for a complete up-to-date list.