Recent Progress in Search for Dark Sector Signatures

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in searching for dark sector signatures, focusing on models like Hidden Valleys and their collider signatures, while discussing experimental challenges and astrophysical motivations.

Contribution

It synthesizes recent theoretical models and experimental results related to dark sector particles, highlighting unique collider signatures and astrophysical implications.

Findings

Dark sector models predict collimated leptons at high energies.

Recent underground experiments constrain dark photon parameter space.

Hidden Valleys can produce distinctive collider signatures.

Abstract

Many difficulties are encountered when attempting to pinpoint a common origin for several observed astrophysical anomalies, and when assessing their tension with existing exclusion limits. These include systematic uncertainties affecting the operation of the detectors, our knowledge of their response, astrophysical uncertainties, and the broad range of particle couplings that can mediate interaction with a detector target. Particularly interesting astrophysical evidence has motivated a search for dark-photon, and focused our attention on a Hidden Valleys model with a GeV-scale dark sector that produces exciting signatures. Results from recent underground experiments are also considered. There is a `light' hidden sector (dark sector), present in many models of new physics beyond the Standard Model, which contains a colorful spectrum of new particles. Recently, it has been shown that this spectrum can give rise to unique signatures at colliders when the mass scale in the hidden sector is well below a TeV; as in Hidden Valleys, Stueckelberg extensions, and Unparticle models. These physics models produce unique signatures of collimated leptons at high energies. By studying these ephemeral particles we hope to trace the history of the Universe. Our present theories lead us to believe that there is something new just around the corner, which should be accessible at the energies made available by modern colliders.