Speaker
Description
This work extends a BSM scenario based on a dark color gauge group SO($N_{\mathrm{DC}}$), with a vector-like heavy SU(2) doublet and one Majorana SM singlet, recently introduced by Antipin et al., and later investigated by Contino et al. We extend the dark flavour sector to two Majorana singlets and explore the possibility of the emergence of Dark Pions, pNGBs of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the dark flavour sector. Our analysis provides an effective description for energies below the confinement scale $\Lambda_{\mathrm{DC}}$ (and below the electroweak scale $\Lambda_{\mathrm{EW}}$). In general, resulting Dark Pions are meta-stable and can decay to the Standard Model states via 5- and 6-dimensional portal operators, leading to distinctive collider signatures like displaced vertices or missing energy, and offering a promising target for long-lived particle searches. However, the main focus of this talk will be on the Light Dark Pions mass regime, in which they are cosmologically stable and could play the role of a light Dark Matter component, produced via freeze-in process from SM states. Additionally, this scenario introduces a Dark Matter candidate—the lightest Dark Baryon—which is stabilized by an accidental $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry.
