Confining Dark Sectors: from Novel Dynamics to Rich Phenomenology

Speakers: Pouya Asadi (University of Oregon)
Potential non-minimal dynamics governing the dark matter interactions can have drastic implications for their phenomenology and can inform our search strategies. In this talk I advocate for meticulous studies of a broad class of next-to-minimal models, namely Confining Dark Sectors. I will argue that such dark sectors establish a general framework that encompasses many simplified models of particle dark matter and serve as the natural target for many on-going and future searches. To illustrate the delicate (yet critical) effect of confinement in the dark sector, I will carefully examine the direct detection signal of the most minimal confining dark sector. In particular, I will show that the nuanced dynamics in such models opens up large swaths of the parameter space that was presumed to be ruled out prior to our work. Our results motivate many future collider and astrophysical searches for this class of confining dark sectors.
https://indico.phys.hawaii.edu/event/2500/