Related papers: Constraining $\alpha_s(M_Z)$ from the Hidden Secto…
Observations of caustic-crossing galaxies at redshift $0.7<z<1$ show a wealth of transient events. Most of them are believed to be microlensing events of highly magnified stars. Earlier work predicted such events should be common near the…
Hidden sectors in connection with GeV-scale dark forces and dark matter are not only a common feature of physics beyond the Standard Model such as string theory and SUSY but are also phenomenologically of great interest regarding recent…
SUSY/SUGRA models with naturalness defined via small $\mu$ are constrained due to experiment on the relic density and the experimental limits on the WIMP-proton cross-section and WIMP annihilation cross-section from indirect detection…
We address the important issue of stabilizing the dilaton in the context of superstring cosmology. Scalar potentials which arise out of gaugino condensates in string models are generally exponential in nature. In a cosmological setting this…
Microlensing of stars places significant constraints on sub-planetary-mass compact objects, including primordial black holes, as dark matter candidates. As the lens' Einstein radius in the source plane becomes comparable to the size of the…
We reexamine interactions between the dark sectors of cosmology, with a focus on robust constraints that can be obtained using only mildly nonlinear scales. While it is well known that couplings between dark matter and dark energy can be…
The non-observation of dark matter (DM) by direct detection experiments suggests that any new interaction of DM with the Standard Model (SM) should be very weak. One of the simplest scenarios to achieve this is a dark sector that is charged…
We study supersymmetry breaking by hidden-sector gaugino condensation in N=1 D=4 supergravity models with multiple dilaton-like moduli fields. Our work is motivated by Type I string theory, in which the low-energy effective Lagrangian can…
Motivated by astrophysical observations of excess electronic production in the galaxy, new theoretical models of the dark matter sector have been proposed in which the Standard model couples to the dark matter sector through an attractive…
Light gravitinos of mass $\lesssim \mathcal{O} (10)$ eV are of particular interest in cosmology, offering various baryogenesis scenarios without suffering from the cosmological gravitino problem. The gravitino may contribute considerably to…
Supersymmetry breaking sectors generically have an approximate global U(1) $R$-symmetry. Thermal effects tend to restore the $R$-symmetry in the reheated early universe. We revisit the gravitino generation from the thermal plasma and we…
Alternative gauge choices for worldsheet supersymmetry can elucidate dynamical phenomena obscured in the usual superconformal gauge. In the particular example of the tachyonic $E_8$ heterotic string, we use a judicious gauge choice to show…
We explore gauge coupling unification and dark matter in high scale supersymmetry where the scale of supersymmetry breaking is much above the weak scale. The gauge couplings unify as precisely as in low energy supersymmetry if the…
We reconsider Sommerfeld-enhanced annihilation of dark matter (DM) into leptons to explain PAMELA and Fermi electron and positron observations, in light of possible new effects from substructure. There is strong tension between getting a…
There is hope that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will tell us about the fate of supersymmetry at the TeVscale. Therefore we might try to identify our expectations for the discovery of SUSY, especially in the first years of…
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…
We place limits on the linear power spectrum on small scales (k > 50 h/Mpc) using measurements of substructure in gravitational lens galaxies. We find excellent agreement with the simplest LambdaCDM models, and in conjunction with other…
Weak scale supersymmetry is a highly motivated extension of the Standard Model that has a strong degree of support from data. It provides several viable dark matter candidates: the lightest neutralino (a WIMP), the gravitino, and the…
If a significant fraction of dark matter is in the form of compact objects, they will cause microlensing effects in the gravitational wave (GW) signals observable by LIGO and Virgo. From the non-observation of microlensing signatures in the…
We study the hidden sector effects to the mass renormalization of a simplest gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking scenario. We point out that possible hidden sector contributions render the soft scalar masses smaller, resulting in…