Related papers: Swampland Bounds on Dark Sectors
In this review we discuss constraints on minimal supersymmetric models of particle physics implied by the recent astrophysical observations of WMAP. Although the prospects of detecting supersymmetry increase and 90 percent of the available…
The swampland distance conjecture (SDC) addresses the ability of effective field theory to describe distant points in moduli space. It is natural to ask whether there is a local version of the SDC: is it possible to construct local…
Uncertainties of the MSSM predictions are due to an unknown SUSY breaking mechanism. To reduce these uncertainties, one usually imposes constraints on the MSSM parameter space. Recently, two new constraints became available, both from…
Certain exotic phenomena in general relativity, such as backward time travel, appear to require the presence of matter with negative energy. While quantum fields are a possible source of negative energy densities, there are lower bounds -…
Dark matter sectors with hidden interactions have been of much interest in recent years. These frameworks include models of millicharged particles as well as dark sector bound states, whose constituents have electromagnetic gauge…
The dS swampland conjecture $|\nabla V|/V \geq c$, where $c$ is presumed to be a positive constant of order unity, implies that the dark energy density of our Universe can not be a cosmological constant, but mostly the potential energy of…
We consider the absorption by bound electrons of dark matter in the form of dark photons and axion-like particles, as well as of dark photons from the Sun, in current and next-generation direct detection experiments. Experiments sensitive…
We consider the constraints from Supernova 1987A on particles with small couplings to the Standard Model. We discuss a model with a fermion coupled to a dark photon, with various mass relations in the dark sector; millicharged particles;…
In this thesis, we investigate various possibilities of Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter (DM) and their implications. These possibilities are important because they challenge the viability of WIMP DM in light of tight…
Weak gravitational lensing provides a unique method to directly map the dark matter in the universe and measure cosmological parameters. Current weak lensing surveys are limited by the atmospheric seeing from the ground and by the small…
Demanding that charged Nariai black holes in (quasi-)de Sitter space decay without becoming super-extremal implies a lower bound on the masses of charged particles, known as the Festina Lente (FL) bound. In this paper we fix the…
We consider the sensitivity of fixed-target neutrino experiments at the luminosity frontier to light stable states, such as those present in models of MeV-scale dark matter. To ensure the correct thermal relic abundance, such states must…
The constraints imposed on the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) parameter space by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Higgs mass limit and gluino mass lower bound are revisited. We also analyze the thermal relic abundance of…
The swampland conjectures seek to distinguish effective field theories which can be consistently embedded in a theory of quantum gravity from those which can not (and are hence referred to as being in the swampland). We consider two such…
We update the constraints on the minimal model of dark matter, where a stable real scalar field is added to the standard model Lagrangian with a renormalizable coupling to the Higgs field. Once we fix the dark matter abundance, there are…
We apply phase-space density considerations to obtain lower bounds on the mass of sterile neutrino as dark matter candidate. The bounds are different for non-resonant production, resonant production in the presence of lepton asymmetry and…
Scenarios with axion-like particles of variable masses, from the milli-eV range to ultralight, can be generated in a natural way in the context of effective field theory models with anomalous $U(1)$ gauge symmetries. They include…
We investigate benchmark scenarios for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) that naturally evade current direct detection constraints by featuring suppressed spin-independent cross-sections. Focusing on three representative models,…
Dark matter particles annihilating into Standard Model fermions may be able to explain the recent observation of a gamma-ray excess in the direction of the Galactic Center. Recently, a hidden photon model has been proposed to explain this…
We discuss the cosmological implications of the string swampland conjectures for late-time cosmology, and test them against a wide range of state of the art cosmological observations. The refined de Sitter conjecture constrains either the…