Light Dark World 2023

Contribution List

57. Hot QCD axion abundance

Giovanni Villadoro (ICTP Trieste)

9/19/23, 9:00 AM

I will discuss recent developments on the determination of the cosmological bound on the QCD axion mass, and the challenges for a correct interpretation of future cosmological surveys.

34. Light Dark ALPs

Susanne Westhoff (Radboud University / Nikhef)

9/19/23, 9:30 AM

Axion-like particles – ALPs – are predicted in many extensions of the Standard Model with a spontaneously broken symmetry. If ALPs exist in Nature, they leave interesting signatures at colliders and other experiments. In this talk, you will hear about new ideas to search for axion-like particles with GeV-scale masses. I will explain what we learn from these searches about ALP interactions with...

9. Inelastic Dark Matter Through The Ages

Saniya Heeba (McGill University)

9/19/23, 10:00 AM

The microphysics of Dark Matter (DM) remains an open question in high energy physics and cosmology. Given the diversity of particles in the Standard Model (SM), it is plausible that DM is also composed of more than one type of particle organized in a “dark sector”. In case of inelastic or pseudo-Dirac DM, the dark sector consists of two nearly mass-degenerate states. These can participate in...

59. The Light Dark Matter Program at MESA

Luca Doria (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz)

9/19/23, 11:00 AM

At the Institute for Nuclear Physics in Mainz the new electron accelerator MESA (Mainz Energy-recovery Superconducting Accelerator) will go into operation within the next years. MESA will provide intense electron beams for hadron and nuclear physics, as well as for light dark matter (LDM) searches. In this contribution, we will present the MAGIX and DarkMESA experiments at MESA. MAGIX, is a...

27. SIMPly add a dark photon

Pieter Braat (Nikhef)

9/19/23, 11:20 AM

Observations of Dark Matter (DM) density profiles are in tension with the standard collisionless DM paradigm and can hint at DM self-interactions. Moreover, observations over different scales require the self-interactions to be velocity-dependent. In the talk I will present a dark sector consisting of dark pions and dark photons that can yield the required velocity dependence, via resonant...

50. A Z portal to the dark sector

Ennio Salvioni (University of Padua)

9/19/23, 11:30 AM

This talk argues that rare Z decays to a QCD-like dark sector provide unexplored opportunities to the LHC experiments. We present two distinct classes of ultraviolet completions of such Z portal, including a novel scenario featuring a light Z’ vector boson, which we show to be compatible with electroweak precision data. We then highlight the phenomenological signatures, focusing on the...

60. Status of the first ALPS II science run

Isabella Oceano (DESY)

9/19/23, 11:50 AM

The Any Light Particle Search II, ALPS II, is a Light Shining through
a Wall experiment at DESY in Hamburg, hunting for axions and axion-like
particles in the sub-meV mass range with an axion-photon coupling gαγγ >
2 × 10−11 GeV−1, improving sensitivity by a factor of 103 compared to its
predecessors. A high-power laser is directed through a long array of supercon-
ducting dipole magnets and...

42. Reconstructing ALP properties from imprecise observations with ML

Dr Alessandro Morandini (KIT, IAP)

9/19/23, 12:00 PM

Inferring theory parameters starting from observed events is a difficult task in high energy physics. This becomes particularly troublesome when dealing with events whose observables are not precisely measured and we want to understand the inference capability of multiple experimental setups. As a representative scenario, we will consider the production of ALPs and their subsequent decay into...

44. Search for Inelastic Dark Matter with a Dark Higgs at Belle II

Patrick Ecker (KIT)

9/19/23, 12:20 PM

Belle II has a unique reach for a broad class of models that postulate the existence of dark matter particles in the MeV-GeV mass range. One highly motivated scenario is a model which involves inelastic dark matter, consisting of two dark matter states with a mass splitting between them and the presence of a dark Higgs boson. This model has a signature of up to two displaced vertices, one from...

53. Results and progress of axion haloscope experiments

Béla Majorovits (MPI für Physik)

9/19/23, 2:00 PM

Axions may well solve both, the Dark Matter and the strong CP problems.
If they really comprise the dark matter, there are good prospects to detect them in the near future.
Presently already some experiments based on cavities are taking data with a sensitivity that should
lead to an axion dark matter discovery, should their mass be in the "classical invisible axion mass range" around...

38. Waves in a Box: Resonant Cavities for Axion and GW Detection

Raffaele Tito D'Agnolo (CEA IPhT Saclay)

9/19/23, 2:30 PM

I will discuss electromagnetic signals generated by gravitational waves (GWs) and light axion dark matter in microwave cavity experiments. In our proposed setup we generate and detect a heterodyne signal. This idea has the potential to cover a factor of 100 in mass on the QCD line and an extra 15 orders of magnitude of unexplored ALPs parameter space. Two prototypes are currently being...

4. Astrophysical axion searches using neutron stars

Samuel Witte

9/19/23, 3:00 PM

In this talk I will discuss a series of novel ideas and searches being developed to indirectly look for the existence of axions in the magnetospheres of neutron stars. The large magnetic fields and the dilute plasma surrounding neutron stars can dramatically enhance the electromagnetic interactions of axions, giving rise to a variety of signatures in the radio band, including: narrow spectral...

58. Atomic sensors for light new particles and high-frequency gravitational waves

Elina Fuchs (CERN, Leibniz University Hannover, PTB Braunschweig)

9/19/23, 3:30 PM

In order to make the small effects of feebly interacting particles as candidates for Dark Matter or mediators to a Dark Sector detectable, novel approaches are in demand. I will present the use of cold atoms as quantum sensors for particle physics questions. In particular, I will show how the rapidly advancing precision of atomic clocks constrains light new bosons and how they could be used...

29. Using axion mini-clusters to disentangle the axion-photon coupling and the dark matter density

Virgile Dandoy (Karlsruhe Institute for Technology)

9/19/23, 4:30 PM

Dark matter direct (and indirect) detection experiments usually can only deter-
mine a specific combination of a power of the coupling and the dark matter density. This is also true for axion haloscopes which are sensitive to the product g^2ρ, the combination of axion-photon coupling squared and the dark matter density. We show, that in the lucky case when we intersect with a so-called...

19. Recurrent Axinovae and their Cosmological Constraints

Huangyu Xiao (Fermilab)

9/19/23, 4:50 PM

Axion-like dark matter whose symmetry breaking occurs after the end of inflation predicts enhanced primordial density fluctuations at small scales. This leads to dense axion minihalos (or miniclusters) forming early in the history of the Universe.
Condensation of axions in the minihalos leads to the formation and subsequent growth of axion stars at the cores of these halos. If, like the QCD...

51. Axion-like particle dark matter: Beyond the standard paradigm

Cem Eröncel (Istanbul Technical University)

9/19/23, 5:00 PM

Axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) are among the most popular candidates that explain the origin of the mysterious dark matter. The most popular ALP production mechanism studied in the literature is the misalignment mechanism, where an ALP field with a quadratic or cosine potential has negligible kinetic energy initially, and it starts oscillating when its mass becomes comparable to the...

32. Bounds on Axions From Obscured Magnetars

Mr Dibya S. Chattopadhyay (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai)

9/19/23, 5:20 PM

Coupling of axions or axion-like particles (ALPs) with photons may lead to photons escaping optically opaque regions by oscillating into ALPs. This phenomenon can be probed through the Light Shining through Wall (LSW) technique. While this LSW technique has been used previously in controlled laboratory settings to constrain the ALP-photon coupling ($g_{a\gamma}$), we show that this can also be...

49. Renormalization group effects in QCD axion phenomenology

Shohei Okawa (ICCUB, University of Barcelona)

9/19/23, 5:30 PM

We study the impact of renormalization group effects on QCD axion phenomenology. Focusing on the DFSZ model, we argue that the relevance of running effects for the axion couplings crucially depends on the scale where the heavier Higgs doublet, charged under the Peccei-Quinn symmetry, is integrated out. We study the impact of these effects on astrophysical and cosmological bounds as well as on...

46. ALP wiggles in photon spectra

Jonas Tjemsland (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)

9/19/23, 5:50 PM

Axions and axion-like-particles (ALPs) are characterized by their two-photon coupling, which entails so-called photon-ALP oscillations as photons propagate through a magnetic field. These oscillations lead to distinctive signatures in the energy spectrum of high-energy photons from astrophysical sources, allowing one to probe the existence of ALPs. In particular, photon-ALP oscillations will...

3. Light dark matter detection in the lab: new tools and new ideas

Angelo Esposito (Sapienza University of Rome)

9/20/23, 9:00 AM

I will discuss some possible avenues to hunt for sub-GeV dark matter in the lab. Specifically, for dark matter in the MeV to GeV range, I will discuss the possibility of employing the so-called Migdal effect in semiconductors. For dark matter in the keV to MeV range, instead, I will discuss the possibility of taking advantage of collective excitations in superfluid He-4 and anti-ferromagnets....

8. Updated constraints from cosmic-ray upscattering of GeV-scale dark matter

Torsten Bringmann (University of Oslo)

9/20/23, 9:30 AM

Dark matter particles with sub-GeV masses can be notoriously difficult to probe, because their typical momenta are insufficient to induce nuclear recoils above the thresholds of conventional direct detection experiments. In fact, it has repeatedly been claimed that even very strongly interacting dark matter could hide in this mass range, supposedly evading all observational bounds. In this...

2. Forbidden Conformal Dark Matter at a GeV

Seung J. Lee (Korea University)

9/20/23, 10:00 AM

In this talk, I will present a new model of DM where the DM is a composite of a spontaneously broken conformal field theory. The DM is a thermal relic with its abundance determined by the freeze-out of annihilations to dilatons, the Goldstone boson of broken conformal symmetry. If the dilaton is heavier than the DM this is an example of forbidden DM. I will present a fully realistic model that...

5. Sub-GeV Dark Matter at large neutrino detectors

Filippo Sala (University of Bologna and INFN)

9/20/23, 11:00 AM

I will review our proposal to observe sub-GeV Dark Matter upscattered by cosmic rays at large neutrino detectors like Super- and Hyper-Kamiokande, DUNE, KamLAND and JUNO. I will show that this technique tests genuinely new parameter space, allowed both by theoretical consistency and by other direct detection experiments, cosmology, meson decays and the LHC. I will present novel strong...

24. X-rays constraints on sub-GeV Dark Matter

Jordan Koechler (LPTHE - Sorbonne Université)

9/20/23, 11:20 AM

In this talk, I will present updated constraints on 'light' dark matter (DM) particles with masses between 1 MeV and 5 GeV. In this range, we can expect DM-produced $e^\pm$ pairs to upscatter ambient photons in the Milky Way via Inverse Compton, and produce a flux of X-rays that can be probed by a range of space observatories. Using diffuse X-ray data from XMM-Newton, INTEGRAL, NuSTAR and...

41. No Need for Speed: Halo-Independent Analysis of Dark-Matter-Electron Scattering

Elias Bernreuther (Fermilab)

9/20/23, 11:30 AM

DM direct detection experiments and the interpretation of their results are sensitive to the velocity structure of the galactic halo. However, the halo model is subject to large uncertainties. In this talk I will present a formalism to analyze DM-electron scattering events in semiconductor experiments without assuming a particular DM velocity distribution. Using simulated data, I will show...

40. Novel limits on solar reflected dark matter with XENONnT

Pueh Leng Tan (Stockholm University)

9/20/23, 11:50 AM

The XENONnT experiment is a low-background dual phase liquid xenon Time Projection Chamber (TPC) with 5.9 tonnes of instrumented liquid xenon. Improved liquid xenon purification and radon distillation system along with various background mitigation strategies brought the electronic recoil backgrounds down to an unprecedented low of (15.8 ± 1.3) events/(keV · t · y) below recoil energies of 30...

31. Light Dark Matter Search with Dual-Phase Argon Time Projection Chamber

Masato Kimura (AstroCeNT, CAMK/PAN)

9/20/23, 12:00 PM

The DarkSide experiment is a direct dark matter search using dual-phase argon time projection chamber. Its preceding experiment, DarkSide-50, produced world-class result for light dark matter search based on a low-threshold electron-counting measurement. A new proposed detector, DarkSide-LowMass, is optimized for such measurement based on the success of the DarkSide-50 and progress towards the...

28. How to Measure the Spin of Dark Matter in $e^+ e^- \to \gamma + X$

Sofie Erner (Durham University)

9/20/23, 12:20 PM

Dark Matter has eluded us for decades and continues to do so. Currently lepton colliders provide exclusion limits on individual dark matter models, but many models may have either identical or indistinguishable signals. Hence there is a need for new methods or observables to determine the nature of the dark matter, especially if more than one candidate is present. Using $ e^+ e^-$ processes...

55. Searching for New Physics with the NANOGrav Pulsar Timing Array

Kai Schmitz (University of Münster)

9/20/23, 2:00 PM

NANOGrav, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, recently announced compelling evidence for the existence of a stochastic gravitational-wave background at nanohertz frequencies. This signal may either be of astrophysical origin and stem from a population of supermassive black-hole binaries, or of cosmological origin, reaching us from the early Universe. In this talk,...

12. Looking Forward to New Physics at the LHC: FASER and the FPF

Jamie Boyd (CERN)

9/20/23, 2:30 PM

FASER is a new experiment for Run-3 of the LHC. Situated in the very forward direction 500m from the ATLAS collision point, the experiment is designed to search for light, weakly coupled new particles and to study high energy neutrinos of all flavours. FASER's first physics results will be presented, along with the future prospects of the experiment.
Studies of the physics potential of FASER...

10. BSM searches at protoDUNE using the SPS accelerator

Pilar Coloma (Instituto de Fisica Teorica UAM-CSIC)

9/20/23, 3:00 PM

The exquisite capabilities of liquid Argon Time Projection Chambers make them ideal to search for weakly interacting particles in Beyond the Standard Model scenarios. Given their location at CERN the ProtoDUNE detectors may be exposed to a flux of such particles, produced in the collisions of 400 GeV protons (extracted from the Super Proton Synchrotron accelerator) on a target. Here we point...

56. Latest results from the NA64 experiment

Laura Molina Bueno (IFIC Valencia)

9/20/23, 3:30 PM

NA64 is a fixed target experiment at CERN searching for dark sectors in the scattering of electron, positron and muons on a target. In this talk, we report its latest results on sub-GeV Dark Matter searches with the 2016-2022 statistics (arXiv:2307.02404). With the new data, NA64 is starting to probe for the first time the very interesting region of parameter space motivated by benchmark light...

20. The Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX)

Jeremiah Mans (University of Minnesota)

9/20/23, 4:30 PM

The constituents of dark matter are still unknown, and the viable possibilities span a very large mass range. Specific scenarios for the origin of dark matter sharpen the focus on a narrower range of masses:  the natural scenario where dark matter originates from thermal contact with familiar matter in the early Universe requires the DM mass to lie within about an MeV to 100 TeV. Considerable...

37. Heavy Photon Search at Jefferson Lab

Sarah Gaiser (SLAC/Stanford)

9/20/23, 4:50 PM

A popular model for light (sub-GeV) Dark Matter (DM) is that its constituents belong to a Hidden Sector, uncharged under the Standard Model (SM) forces, and coupled to the SM through a new force carrier. In particular, theoretically well-motivated models propose the existence of a new U(1) light gauge boson, called the heavy (or dark) photon A’ which kinetically mixes with the SM photon. The...

23. Probing for light new particles with the LUXE experiment

Raquel Quishpe (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)

9/20/23, 5:00 PM

The proposed LUXE experiment (LASER Und XFEL Experiment) at DESY, Hamburg, using the electron beam from the European XFEL, aims to probe QED in the non-perturbative regime created in collisions between high-intensity laser pulses and high-energy electron or photon beams. This setup also provides a unique opportunity to probe physics beyond the standard model. In this talk we show that by...

25. Looking forward to photon-coupled sub-GeV long-lived particles

Krzysztof Jodlowski (IBS-CTPU)

9/20/23, 5:20 PM

Many Dark Sector models contain photon-coupled long-lived particles. An outstanding example is an axion-like particle decaying into two photons. The forward physics detectors at the LHC, e.g., FASER, were shown to be particularly suitable for hunting ~sub-GeV ALPs thanks to numerous photons produced in pp collisions, which in turn are efficiently converted into ALPs by the Primakoff...

13. Sensitivities to feebly interacting particles: public and unified calculations

Dr Maksym Ovchynnikov (KIT)

9/20/23, 5:30 PM

The idea that new physics could take the form of feebly interacting particles (FIPs) - particles with a mass below the electroweak scale, but which may have evaded detection due to their tiny couplings or very long lifetime - has gained a lot of traction in the last decade. Numerous experiments have been proposed to search for such particles. It is important, and now very timely, to...

30. DELIGHT and FOREHUNT : dedicated detectors at FCC-hh for light long-lived particles

Rhitaja Sengupta (BCTP and Physikalisches Institut der Universität Bonn, Germany)

9/20/23, 5:50 PM

Our efforts in searching for hints of new physics require close attention to the signatures of light particles arising in theories beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics, as they could have eluded our searches. In many theories, these light BSM particles can have long lifetimes and are worth exploring. We focus on light long-lived particles (LLPs) coming from the decay of the discovered Higgs...

39. Mineral Detectors for Neutrinos and Dark Matter

Sebastian Baum

9/21/23, 9:00 AM

Minerals have been used as nuclear track detectors for more than 50 years - nuclear recoils leave latent damage in the crystal structure. In the past years, there has been much interest in fundamental physics applications for such detectors, not least because of advances in microscopy techniques that have revolutionized our abilities to image defects at the nm scale. In this talk, I will...

35. Beyond the Standard Model physics searches with double-beta decays

Elisabetta Bossio (TUM)

9/21/23, 9:30 AM

Nuclear double-beta decays are a unique probe to search for new physics Beyond the Standard Model. Still-unknown particles, non-standard interactions, or the violation of fundamental symmetries would affect the decay kinematic, creating detectable and characteristic experimental signatures. In particular, the energy distribution of the electrons emitted in the decay gives an insight into the...

47. Model-Independent Searches for sub-MeV Dark Particles via Weak Decay Recoil Spectroscopy

Kyle Leach (FRIB and Colorado School of Mines)

9/21/23, 10:00 AM

Nuclear beta and electron capture (EC) decay serve as sensitive probes of the structure and symmetries of the charged weak force between quarks and leptons.  As such, precision measurements of the final-state products in these processes can be used as powerful laboratories to search for new physics from the meV to TeV scale.  Significant advances in rare isotope availability and quality,...

17. Neutrino non-standard self-interactions and their impact on sterile neutrino dark matter

Dr Cristina Benso (Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik)

9/21/23, 11:00 AM

Sterile neutrinos with keV-scale masses are popular candidates for warm dark matter. In the most straightforward case, they are produced via oscillations with active neutrinos. We focus on mixing with electron neutrinos and antineutrinos, which is object of test in several upcoming or running experiments like TRISTAN, ECHo, and HUNTER. We introduce effective self-interactions of active...

7. Light vector bosons and the weak mixing angle in the light of new reactor-based CE$\nu$NS experiments

Thomas Rink (Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik)

9/21/23, 11:20 AM

After the first observation of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CE$\nu$NS), further experiments with different technologies have been established and the question arises how this signal can be further exploited for a variety of investigations in the future. In this context, nuclear reactors with their intense emission of low-energy antineutrinos in combination with high-purity...

45. How to catch relic neutrinos?

Prof. Boyarsky Alexey (Leiden University )

9/21/23, 11:30 AM

I will briefly review the old story of relic neutrinos and their potential role in cosmology and in particle physics, the state of the art in experimental searches for them and possible steps forward as I see them

15. Confronting Dark Matter with Dirac Neutrinos

Dr Dibyendu Nanda (Korea Institute for Advanced Study)

9/21/23, 11:50 AM

The identity of neutrinos, Dirac or Majorara, is an essential yet unsolved puzzle of nature. By assuming that neutrinos are Dirac particles, we propose a light Dirac neutrino portal dark matter scenario which is based on the possible correlation between the relic right-handed neutrinos and present dark matter abundance. We studied the connection between dark matter and the light right-handed...

16. Probing Dark Matter-Proton Interactions with Cosmic Reservoirs

Marco Chianese (University of Naples Federico II)

9/21/23, 12:00 PM

Dark Matter (DM) existence is a milestone of the cosmological standard model and, yet, its discovery still remains a complete conundrum. In this talk, I will investigate a unique and original way to probe properties of light dark matter candidates, exploiting the nature of the cosmic-ray (CR) transport inside starburst nuclei (SBNs). Indeed, SBNs are considered CR reservoirs, trapping them for...

1. Direct detection of light dark matter from evaporating primordial black holes

Roberta Calabrese

9/21/23, 12:20 PM

Light Dark Matter has recently gained a lot of attention. Generally, direct detection of sub-GeV Dark Matter is challenging since it induces low recoil energies. The problem is solved by considering light Dark Matter with considerable kinetic energies. In this talk, we point out that Primordial Black Hole evaporation is a source of boosted light dark Matter with energies of tens to hundreds of...

21. Early galaxy formation and its large-scale effects in the JWST era

Dr Pratika Dayal (Kapteyn Astronomical Institute)

9/21/23, 2:00 PM

Galaxy formation in the first billion years mark a time of great upheaval in our cosmic history: the first sources of light in the Universe, these galaxies ended the 'cosmic dark ages' and produced the first photons that could break apart the hydrogen atoms suffusing all of space starting the process of cosmic reionization. At the forefront of astronomical research, the past few years have...

33. Thermal friction as a solution to the Hubble tension

Kim Berghaus (Stony Brook University)

9/21/23, 2:30 PM

I will talk about the two most prominent tensions of the LCDM model of cosmology, the Hubble Tension and the Large-Scale Structure (LSS) Tension. Both emerge between early and late universe data sets, yet no new single new physics explanation is able to address both successfully. An epoch of Early Dark Energy is a promising hypothesis that can resolve the Hubble tension but has been shown to...

6. Neutrinos in Cosmology

Miguel Escudero Abenza (CERN)

9/21/23, 3:00 PM

Neutrinos are ubiquitous in cosmology and they represent a relevant component of the energy density of the Universe across its entire history. This fact makes cosmology a key arena to understand the properties of the most elusive particles in the Standard Model. I will review the main cosmological implications of neutrinos including their impact on Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and the Cosmic...

54. Testing dark forces with LSS

Diego Redigolo (INFN Florence)

9/21/23, 3:30 PM

If the dark sector interacts with the visible one only through gravitational interactions, precision cosmology might be our best tool to test its dynamics. As a first step in this direction, we investigate the imprints of new long range forces acting solely on dark matter. Accounting for the presence of dark fifth forces in the effective field theory of large scale structure we derive the...

43. A global analysis of decaying cosmological ALPs

Tomas Gonzalo (KIT)

9/21/23, 4:30 PM

Axion-like particles (ALPs) decaying before the time of recombination can have strong implications in a range of cosmological and astrophysical observations. In this talk I present a global analysis of a model of decaying ALP, focusing specifically on their coupling to photons. Exploiting the multidisciplinary nature of the GAMBIT framework, we combine state-of-the-art calculations of the...

36. Probing dark matter microphysics with gravitational waves and 21cm emission

Markus Mosbech (RWTH Aachen)

9/21/23, 4:50 PM

The microphysics of dark matter remains a mystery, with current data only setting upper bounds on interaction cross sections, or lower bounds on the mass in the case of a thermal relic. Going to higher redshift and smaller scales will let us improve these bounds, but more importantly, may allow us to distinguish between models with otherwise similar signals. In particular, I will present a...

22. Gauged quintessence

Hye-Sung Lee (KAIST)

9/21/23, 5:00 PM

Dark energy is the least understood component of the universe despite its dominance. A proper understanding of the universe might require an investigation of the possible symmetries of the dark sector. We introduce a gauge symmetry to a quintessence dark energy field and discuss its implications. This talk is based on 2208.09229 and 2306.01291.

18. Asymmetries in Extended Dark Sectors

Drona Vatsyayan (IFIC, Universitat de Valencia)

9/21/23, 5:20 PM

The observed dark matter relic abundance may be explained by different mechanisms, such as thermal freeze-out/freeze-in, with one or more symmetric/asymmetric components. In this work we investigate the role played by asymmetries in determining the yield and nature of dark matter in non-minimal scenarios with more than one dark matter particle. In particular, we show that the energy density of...

26. Forbidden dark matter annihilation into leptons with full collision terms

Mr Luca Wiggering (University of Münster)

9/21/23, 5:30 PM

The standard approach of calculating the relic density of thermally produced dark matter based on the assumption of kinetic equilibrium is known to fail for forbidden dark matter models since only the high momentum tail of the dark matter phase space distribution function contributes significantly to dark matter annihilations. Furthermore, it is known that the computationally less expensive...

62. Production of Feebly Interacting particles at Finite Temperature

Mathias Becker (JGU Mainz)

9/21/23, 5:40 PM

Models of feebly-interacting Dark Matter (DM) have gained popularity due to the non-observation of DM in direct detection experiments. Unlike DM freeze-out, which occurs when the dark sector particles are non-relativistic, feebly-interacting DM is primarily produced at temperatures corresponding to the heaviest mass scale involved in the production process. Consequently, incorporating finite...

61. Minimal FIMP models during reheating and inflationary constraints

Emanuele Copello (JGU Mainz)

9/21/23, 6:00 PM

We study the production of Dark Matter (DM) in a minimal freeze-in model during inflationary reheating. We analyze the case where a heavier parent particle decays into DM and a Standard Model fermion in two reheating scenarios: bosonic reheating (BR) and fermionic reheating (FR). Firstly, we show that for low reheating temperatures, BR and FR scenarios predict different lifetimes and masses...

52. Dark Pions at Neutrino Facilities

Dr Asli Abdullahi (Fermilab)

We present a chiral non-abelian dark sector model featuring a spontaneous $SU(3) \times SU(2) \rightarrow SU(3)$ symmetry breaking, resulting in the formation of dark mesons and baryons. The absence of a gauged $U(1)$ symmetry allows the dark baryons, typically the dark protons, to potentially serve as dark matter candidates. The model incorporates HNLs and explores scenarios with enhanced...

14. Muon $(g−2)$ and Thermal WIMP DM in $U(1)_{L_\mu - L_\tau}$ Models

Pyungwon Ko (KIAS)

$U(1)_{L_\mu - L_\tau} \equiv U(1)_X$ model is anomaly free within the Standard Model (SM) fermion content, and can accommodate the muon $(g−2)$ data for $M_{Z′} \sim O(10−100)$ MeV and $g_X \sim (4−8) \times 10^{-4}$. WIMP type thermal dark matter (DM) can be also introduced for $M_{Z′} \sim 2M_{\rm DM}$, if DM pair annihilations into the SM particles occur only through the $s$-channel $Z′$...

11. Opening up the Light Dark Matter Model Space with Scalar Co-SIMPs

Aditya Parikh (Stony Brook University)

In this talk, we present UV completions of the recently proposed number-changing Co-SIMP freeze-out mechanism. In contrast to the standard cannibalistic-type dark matter picture that occurs entirely in the dark sector, the $3\to 2$ process setting the relic abundance in this case requires one Standard Model particle in the initial and final states. This prevents the dark sector from...

63. Reception and poster session

Reception and poster session