Bound states in dark-matter physics

by Kalliopi Petraki (LPTHE Paris 6)

Wednesday 13 Jan 2016, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Brussels

E/3rd floor-E.349 - Seminar room (E.349) (Marc de Hemptinne (chemin du Cyclotron, 2, Louvain-la-Neuve))

Dark matter with long-range interactions, mediated by a light or massless force carrier, appears in a variety of theories with different motivation. Examples include self-interacting dark matter, which can currently explain the observed galactic structure better than collisionless dark matter, as well as models constructed to explain astrophysical anomalies, such as the positron excess or the high-energy IceCube neutrinos. Notably, even the Weak interactions of the Standard Model exhibit long-range behaviour if the interacting particles are heavier than a few TeV. An important implication of long-range interactions is the existence of bound states. The formation of dark-matter bound states in the early universe and/or in the dense environment of haloes today may affect the phenomenology of dark matter in many ways. I will discuss in some detail the effect of the formation and decay of unstable bound states on the dark-matter relic abundance, and I will then describe a field-theoretic framework for the computation of bound-state related processes in dark-matter phenomenology.

Slides Talk_2016_01_13_Louvain_BoundStates.pdf