[IP2I seminar] Dark Matter Phenomenology - F. Kahlhoefer (KIT, Karlsruhe, DE) - Light but with a chance of showers: Phenomenology of strongly-interacting dark sectors

mardi 23 juin 2026, 10:00 → 11:00 Europe/Paris

Dirac/RdC-Amphithéâtre (IP2I)

Models of strongly-interacting dark sectors are based on the idea that there may be a new type of matter that behaves similar to quarks and gluons but couples very weakly to visible matter. In such a set-up, dark quarks interacting via a new non-Abelian gauge extension of the Standard Model would confine into dark mesons and baryons at low energies. Some of these dark hadrons may be stable and provide a viable dark matter candidate. I will first discuss the cosmological and astrophysical constraints on such models and argue that these considerations favour particle masses around the GeV-scale. At accelerator experiments, the pair production of dark quarks would give rise to dark showers with a high multiplicity of dark mesons. If some of these dark mesons decay into Standard Model particles, we can expect exciting exotic signatures, such as semi-visible jets or displaced vertices. I will discuss existing constraints and opportunities from searches for long-lived particles at Belle II and the proposed SHiP beam-dump experiment. Finally, I will consider the possibility to search for semi-visible jets produced in Higgs boson decays at FCC-ee using graph neural networks.