Cosmic Signals from the Hidden Sector

Understand

Cosmologically long-lived, composite states arise as natural dark matter candidates in theories with a strongly interacting hidden sector at a scale of 10 - 100 TeV.

• Light axion-like states, with masses in the 1 MeV - 10 GeV range, are also generic, and can decay via Higgs couplings to light standard model particles.
• Such a scenario is well motivated in the context of very low energy supersymmetry breaking, where ubiquitous cosmological problems associated with the gravitino are avoided.
• We investigate the astrophysical and collider signatures of this scenario, assuming that dark matter decays into the axion-like states via dimension six operators, and we present an illustrative model exhibiting these features.