Speaker
Description
The evidence for Dark Matter in nature is overwhelming. A particle explanation is both conservative and compelling. Nonetheless, with gravitation its only known experimental signal, general considerations allow the particle’s mass to be anywhere within 41 orders of magnitude below the Planck scale. This range narrows significantly if we propose simple extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics to include Dark Matter. The mass scale needed to achieve the measured abundance of Dark Matter in the Universe in this scenario comes out to be near the scale of electroweak symmetry breaking, 10^2-10^4 GeV, giving the so-called Weakly-Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) Miracle. Although these models are simple to write down as lagrangians, their dynamics is nontrivial, including multiple non-perturbative quantum mechanical effects. Understanding their physics properly is crucial for discovering or ruling out simple WIMP Dark Matter. I will describe how state-of-the-art Effective Field Theories, inspired by those developed for studying the strong nuclear force (QCD), resolve questions about the viability of the simplest WIMPs.
