Graham Kribs, Surprises in Strongly-Coupled Dark Sectors

Thursday 30 Apr 2026, 14:00 → 16:00 Europe/London

New strongly-coupled confining dark sectors have found application throughout numerous areas of particle physics, extending from dark matter itself, to theories that address the hierarchy problem, to providing a vast array of new collider signals.  I'll provide an overview of the theory space, the dark matter candidates, and then discuss some very simple theories that have surprising dark matter and collider physics properties.  The elastic scattering cross section for direct detection experiments can be highly suppressed for dark baryons due to the structure of theory and the symmetries that survive confinement.  Dark mesons can be strongly constrained by disappearing track searches as well as resonant production and decay, the latter arising because of a global-gauge-gauge anomaly that was not previously recognized.  Time permitting, I'll briefly discuss other surprises and connect to some of the open questions that remain.