Noble Dark Matter Dodging Direct Detection

by Austin Batz (University of Oregon)

Thursday 6 Mar 2025, 13:30 → 14:30 Europe/Zurich

4/2-037 - TH meeting room (CERN)

Composite WIMP-like dark matter has subtler phenomenology than historically appreciated. In a confining dark sector with electroweak-charged dark quarks, the dark baryons are in various representations of Standard Model gauge groups and may be viable dark matter candidates. We categorize these representations for a class of theories, showing that the dark matter candidate in several cases is either a pure gauge-singlet or a singlet with a small admixture of neutral states in other electroweak representations. This singlet nature, in addition to suppression of electromagnetic moments due to the recently discovered H-parity, strongly suppresses the dark baryons' interactions with the Standard Model. In particular, these "Noble Dark Matter" models are characteristically difficult to probe in direct detection experiments. These features are not captured by WIMP models where dark matter is the neutral component of a single non-trivial electroweak multiplet. We also discuss calculating the baryon mass spectrum and possible search strategies for colliders and indirect detection that could discover these models.