Research Seminars @ Illinois

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Tailored for undergraduate researchers, this calendar is a curated list of research seminars at the University of Illinois. Explore the diverse world of research and expand your knowledge through engaging sessions designed to inspire and enlighten.

To have your events added or removed from this calendar, please contact OUR at ugresearch@illinois.edu

Special Physics Seminar - Confining Dark Sectors: from Novel Dynamics to Rich Phenomenology

Event Type: Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor: The Physics Department
Location: Rhondale Tso Seminar Room, 236 Loomis
Date: Mar 3, 2025 1:00 pm
Speaker: Pouya Asadi, University of Oregon
Contact: Brandy Koebbe
E-Mail: bkoebbe@illinois.edu
Views: 79
Originating Calendar: Physics - Nuclear Physics Seminar; The particle nature of dark matter is currently one of the biggest open questions of particle physics. Potential non-minimal dynamics governing the dark matter interactions can have drastic implications for their phenomenology and can inform our search strategies. In this talk I advocate for meticulous studies of a broad class of next-to-minimal models, namely Confining Dark Sectors. I will argue that such dark sectors establish a general framework that encompasses many simplified models of particle dark matter and serve as the natural target for many on-going and future searches. To illustrate the delicate (yet critical) effect of confinement in the dark sector, I will carefully examine the direct detection signal of the most minimal confining dark sector. In particular, I will show that the nuanced dynamics in such models opens up large swaths of the parameter space that was presumed to be ruled out prior to our work. I will then outline a vast research program motivated by such models, spanning various astrophysical and collider searches.

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