Searching for Elusive Dark Sectors with Terrestrial and Celestial Observations
Roberto Contino, Kevin Max, and Rashmish K. Mishra

TL;DR
This paper explores the potential existence of a light, SM-neutral dark sector coupled via portal interactions, analyzing constraints from experiments and astrophysics, and emphasizing collider bounds and future search strategies.
Contribution
It characterizes dark sectors with conformal behavior between UV and IR scales and derives experimental constraints in a model-independent framework.
Findings
High-energy colliders exclude UV scales up to a few TeV.
Constraints depend on the IR scale, with specific ranges being more constrained.
Current searches provide a baseline for designing future experiments.
Abstract
We consider the possible existence of a SM-neutral and light dark sector coupled to the visible sector through irrelevant portal interactions. Scenarios of this kind are motivated by dark matter and arise in various extensions of the Standard Model. We characterize the dark dynamics in terms of one ultraviolet scale , at which the exchange of heavy mediator fields generates the portal operators, and by one infrared scale , setting the mass gap. At energies the dark sector behaves like a conformal field theory and its phenomenology can be studied model independently. We derive the constraints set on this scenario by high- and low-energy laboratory experiments and by astrophysical observations. Our results are conservative and serve as a minimum requirement that must be fulfilled by the broad class of…
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