Light but with a chance of showers: Phenomenology of strongly interacting dark sectors

by Felix Kahlhöfer (KIT)

Tuesday 4 Nov 2025, 16:00 → 17:30 Europe/Berlin

Auditorium (DESY)

Models of strongly-interacting dark sectors are based on the idea that there may be a new type of matter that behaves similar to quarks and gluons but couples very weakly to visible matter. In such a set-up, dark quarks interacting via a new non-Abelian gauge extension of the Standard Model would confine into dark mesons and baryons at low energies. Some of these dark hadrons may be stable and provide a viable dark matter candidate. I will first discuss the cosmological and astrophysical constraints on such models and argue that these considerations favour particle masses around the GeV-scale.

At accelerator experiments, the pair production of dark quarks would give rise to dark showers with a high multiplicity of dark mesons. If some of these dark mesons decay into Standard Model particles, we can expect exciting exotic signatures, such as semi-visible jets or displaced vertices. I will discuss existing constraints and opportunities from searches for long-lived particles at Belle II, the proposed SHiP experiment and in Higgs boson decays at FCC-ee.

 

We invite you to attend the presentation in person at the DESY Auditorium. We will also offer a webcast to this colloquium.

https://desy.zoom.us/j/99616528733

Meeting ID: 996 1652 8733 
Meeting Password: 733220

PAcolloquium-poster_Kahlhoefer_4Nov2025.pdf