[IP2I Seminar] Particle Phenomenology - Joshua Lockyer: "Surveying the Composite Dark Sector Landscape"

Friday Oct 31, 2025, 2:00 PM → 3:00 PM Europe/Paris

Dirac/RdC-Amphithéâtre (IP2I)

Composite dark sectors (DS) extend the Standard Model (SM) with a new confining gauge group connected to the SM through a heavy mediator. The confining and asymptotically free nature of composite dark sectors naturally give rise to long-lived mesons and to “dark showers” - analogous to SM jets though generically containing an abundance of missing energy. Such signatures make for novel and unique BSM collider signatures. 

It is necessary to go beyond composite dark sectors resembling QCD in order to design searches that don't miss out on any interesting or weird anomalous jet signatures. In this vein, we seek to extend the investigation of composite DS models beyond QCD-like theories to theories within the conformal window. Here, the running coupling, controlled by the renormalisation group equations (RGE), flows near to an infra-red fixed point. We establish a framework of RGE solutions allowing us to present the first phenomenological results of such near-conformal dark sectors and compare these results to their predicted parton multiplicity in a few limiting cases.

IP2I seminars - Joshua Lockyer.pdf