Related papers: Dark Sectors and New, Light, Weakly-Coupled Partic…
We examine the possibility of "soft cosmology", namely small deviations from the usual framework due to the effective appearance of soft-matter properties in the Universe sectors. One effect of such a case would be the dark energy to…
These lectures are intended to provide a brief pedagogical review of dark matter for the newcomer to the subject. We begin with a discussion of the astrophysical evidence for dark matter. The standard weakly-interacting massive particle…
Particle physics candidates for cosmological dark matter are usually considered as neutral and weakly interacting. However stable charged leptons and quarks can also exist and, hidden in elusive atoms, play the role of dark matter. The…
Axion-like particles (ALPs) can provide a portal to new states of a dark sector. We study the phenomenology of this portal when the ALP mainly decays invisibly, while its interaction with the standard model sector proceeds essentially via…
Axions and axion like particles in general are consequences of the extensions of the standard model in particle physics. Axions have been proposed as hypothetical pseudo-scalar particles in particle physics to solve the strong Charge-Parity…
Strong motivation for investing in quantum sensing arises from the need to investigate phenomena that are very weakly coupled to the matter and fields well described by the Standard Model. These can be related to the problems of dark…
The recent observational evidence for the current cosmic acceleration have stimulated renewed interest in alternative cosmologies, such as scenarios with interaction in the dark sector (dark matter and dark energy). In general, such models…
In a class of theories, dark matter is explained by postulating the existence of a `dark sector', which interacts gravitationally with ordinary matter. If this dark sector contains a U(1) symmetry, and a corresponding `dark' photon…
The focus on dark matter search has expanded to include low-mass particles such as axions or axion-like particles, and novel theoretical schemes extending the phenomenological landscape, within QCD and beyond, also garnered additional…
The axion arises in well-motivated extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics and is regarded as an alternative to the weakly interacting massive particle paradigm to explain the nature of dark matter. In this contribution, we…
Many theoretically well-motivated extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics predict the existence of the axion and further ultralight axion-like particles. They may constitute the mysterious dark matter in the universe and solve…
The dark photon is a massive hypothetical particle that interacts with the Standard Model by kinetically mixing with the visible photon. For small values of the mixing parameter, dark photons can evade cosmological bounds to be a viable…
We present a systematic cosmological study of a universe in which the visible sector is coupled, albeit very weakly, to a hidden sector comprised of its own set of particles and interactions. Assuming that dark matter (DM) resides in the…
I review the theoretical motivation for varying fundamental couplings and discuss how these measurements can be used to constrain a number of fundamental physics scenarios that would otherwise be inacessible to experiment. As a case study I…
Astronomical and cosmological observations of the past 80 years build solid evidence that atomic matter makes up only a small fraction of the matter in the universe. The dominant fraction does not interact with electromagnetic radiation,…
In our quest to understand the nature of dark matter and discover its non-gravitational interactions with ordinary matter, we propose an experiment using a \pbo ~calorimeter to search for or set new limits on the production rate of i)…
An intense, 120 GeV proton beam incident on an extremely long, iron target generates enormous numbers of light-mass particles that also decay within that target. If one of these particles decays to a final state with a hidden gauge boson,…
There is almost universal agreement among cosmologists that most of the matter in the Universe is dark, and there are very good reasons to believe that most of this dark matter must be nonbaryonic. The two leading candidates for this dark…
Dark matter (DM) can be composed of a collection of axions, or axion-like particles (ALPs), whose existence is due to the spontaneous breaking of the Peccei-Quinn $U(1)$ symmetry which is the most compelling solution of the strong…
WIMPs, weakly-interacting massive particles, have been leading candidates for particle dark matter for decades, and they remain a viable and highly motivated possibility. In these lectures, I describe the basic motivations for WIMPs,…