Strongly Interacting Light Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper explores how strongly coupled light dark matter, constrained by fundamental symmetries, can appear weakly interacting at low energies and serve as promising targets for collider searches.

Contribution

It identifies the class of symmetries and effective operators governing strongly coupled light dark matter, highlighting their phenomenological implications.

Findings

Effective operators up to dimension-8 describe interactions

Dark matter candidates include composite fermions and pseudo Nambu-Goldstone bosons

Potential signals for LHC missing-energy searches are discussed

Abstract

In the presence of approximate global symmetries that forbid relevant interactions, strongly coupled light Dark Matter (DM) can appear weakly coupled at small energy and generate a sizable relic abundance. Fundamental principles like unitarity restrict these symmetries to a small class, where the leading interactions are captured by effective operators up to dimension-8. Chiral symmetry, spontaneously broken global symmetries and non-linearly realized supersymmetry are examples of this. Their DM candidates (composite fermions, pseudo Nambu-Goldstone Bosons and Goldstini) are interesting targets for LHC missing-energy searches.