dr Roman Pasechnik

“Shedding light on the dark side of the Universe”

Abstract:
Consistent explanation for astrophysical Dark Matter (DM) remains one of the major unsolved problems of contemporary fundamental physics. First, I will give a brief historical overview of this problem and the current state of the art. Then, I will focus on a novel class of Dark Matter (DM) candidates in the form of a heavy composite Axion-Like Particle (ALP) with highly suppressed electromagnetic interactions populating vast yet unexplored domains in the ALP parameter space. I will demonstrate how the simplest confining gauge theory in the dark sector yields a composite ALP state in the form of glueballs. Such a glueball ALP (GALP) features very specific properties such as unique electromagnetic coupling-mass relation found in terms of two distinct fundamental scales -- the large dark fermion mass scale and the dynamical scale of dark confinement. Finally, I will overview novel phenomenological probes for composite DM, in particular, for direct detection experiments such as PandaX.