RUI: Implications of Non-Minimal Dark Sectors

Lafayette College, Easton PA

Investigators

Abstract

Overwhelming evidence suggests that the majority of the matter in our universe consists of a mysterious form of matter that neither emits nor absorbs light, but yet makes its presence felt via its gravitational pull on normal matter. The nature and origin of this "dark matter" continue to elude us; moreover, recent experimental results have begun to call into question a lot of the canonical ideas about what this dark matter might be. The research supported by this award aims to address this "dark-matter problem" on two fronts. The first involves the development of viable, testable alternative proposals as to what the dark matter might be. The second involves proposing novel experimental methods for probing the properties of the dark matter and assessing (typically through computer simulations) what these methods could potentially reveal about the properties of the dark matter. A significant portion of this award will support undergraduate involvement in this research topic, thereby cultivating interest among the next generation of scientists and honing their computational skills. The aim of the research supported by this award is to study the theory and phenomenology of non-traditional and non-minimal dark-matter scenarios in an effort to better understand the full range of viable possibilities for the dark sector. This research program has two facets. The first is to identify viable alternatives to the traditional picture of dark matter which are consistent with current experimental and observational constraints. The second is to investigate the phenomenological and cosmological consequences of such alternative dark-matter models with an eye toward experimental or observational signatures which could serve to distinguish such alternative dark-matter models from their traditional counterparts. One promising strategy is to look for evidence of non-standard particle kinematics at colliders, at direct-detection experiments, and at astrophysical probes of dark matter. A significant portion of this effort will be focused on non-minimal dark-matter scenarios within the Dynamical Dark Matter (DDM) framework. Within the DDM framework, the dark-matter candidate is an ensemble comprising a potentially vast number of individual particle species whose decay widths are balanced against their cosmological abundances across the ensemble in such a way that all phenomenological constraints are satisfied.