Despite being an elegant mechanism to explain Dark Matter (DM) production, freeze-in introduces challenges: If DM interacts via non-renormalizable operators, the predictions are highly sensitive to initial conditions, such as the reheating temperature of the universe. These issues are particularly relevant in models in which the universe deviates from radiation domination and the entropy of...
A natural dark matter candidate in many theories of strongly-interacting dark sectors is the dark pion $\pi_D$, which is a composite particle that is expected to have a mass close to or below the GeV scale. In many cases, these theories also contain a light vector meson, $\rho_D$, that can be produced together with dark pions through dark showers created in particle collisions. Cosmological...
Light-cone distribution amplitudes (LCDAs) for the $\Lambda_b$ baryon enter as universal hadronic matrix elements in QCD factorization approaches for energetic decays. Observables (e.g. form factors) can then be expressed as a convolution of the LCDA and a hard scattering kernel to the desired order in the strong coupling. The LCDAs are genuinely non-perturbative quantities that describe the...
