Dark matter as Long lived particles

Dark Matter Seminar (Slides) - Link to PDF
Dark Matter Seminar (Report) - Link to PDF

Abstract

This is a summary report of a talk given at University of Heidelberg for the MVSem course “Dark matter theory” under the supervision of Prof. Susanne Westhoff. This was the ninth talk, and the topics covered in the previous talks on dark matter detection, dark matter at colliders and non-thermal dark matter helped to build up to this talk. The goal of this talk was to introduce the dormant nature of LLPs as a Dark matter candidate and discuss the foundations as well as the current affairs of research with respect to them.

Long lived particles (LLPs) started to arise as a potential candidate for Dark matter after the dawn of the WIMP prejudice. Long lived particles have been ubiquitously found in the Standard model of Particle Physics and also have been hypothesized in other theories like the SUSY. This hinted towards considering the potential candidacy of LLPs in Beyond the Standard Model physics (BSM). In this summary, we cover the essential ingredients that essentially make a particle long lived. Based on these ingredients, we discuss a few examples of their possible creation, both thermally and non-thermally. Then, we move towards the detection part and talk about how one could use the present state of the art collider detectors like the CMS/ATLAS in order to find such particles. We talk about various signatures that could be prospectively observed. While doing this, we realize that we are limited in the range of observable lifetimes, that could be used in order to increase our chances for detecting LLPs. Last but not least, various detector proposals that could help us explore this latent parameter space have been discussed.