Beyond vanilla dark matter: new channels in the multifaceted search for dark matter
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2014-08
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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Though we are extremely confident that non-baryonic dark matter exists in our universe,very little is known about its fundamental nature or its relationship with the Standard Model. Guided by theoretical motivations, a desire for generality in our experimental strategies, and a certain amount of hopeful optimism, we have established a basic framework and set of assumptions about the dark sector which we are now actively testing. After years of probing the parameter spaces of these vanilla dark-matter scenarios, through a variety of different search channels, a conclusive direct (non-gravitational) discovery of dark matter eludes us. This very well may suggest that our first-order expectations of the dark sector are too simplistic. This work describes two ways in which we can expand the experimental reach of vanilla dark-matter scenarios while maintaining the model-independent generality which is at this point still warranted. One way in which this is done is to consider coupling structures between the SM and the dark sector other than the two canonical types--scalar and axial-vector--leading to spin dependent and independent interactions at direct-detection experiments. The second way we generalize the vanilla scenarios is to consider multi-component dark sectors. We find that both of these generalizations lead to new and interesting phenomenology, and provide a richer complementarity structure between the different experimental probes we are using to search for dark matter.
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non-baryonic
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Theses for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (University of Hawaii at Manoa). Physics.
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