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Stanford EE

On Elusiveness of Dark Confinement

Summary
Pouya Asadi (Oregon)
Varian 312
Jan
17
Date(s)
Content

I review some intriguing, and nuanced, dynamics in confining dark sectors. This is meant to underscore the elusive nature of such sectors across different experiments. I will study the effect of a first order confinement phase transition in sectors with only dark heavy quarks and show that this phase transition drastically depletes the symmetric dark matter abundance which, in turn, suppresses their indirect detection signals. I will then focus on the most minimal confining dark sectors, where dark quarks are connected to the Standard Model via electroweak interactions. I will show that in these models direct detection signals are suppressed. This suppression is attributed to the fact that DM is typically an electroweak singlet and to the existence of a hitherto unnoticed symmetry. The implication of our findings is that composite dark sectors require a herculean effort among direct detection, indirection detection, and especially collider searches to discover or rule out, embodying their ``last WIMP standing'' status for a lot longer than previously thought.