3:30–4:30 pm
Maria Goeppert-Mayer Lecture Hall Kersten Physics Teaching Center
Room 106
5720 S. Ellis Avenue
Exploring the Cosmologies of Dark Sectors
Jessie Shelton, UIUC
Host: Liantao Wang
One generic scenario for the dark matter of our universe is that it resides in a hidden sector: it talks to other dark fields more strongly than it talks to the Standard Model. This class of models is well-motivated by high-scale theories such as string theory, can easily accomodate the null results observed in terrestrial detectors to date, and --perhaps most importantly -- can produce a wide variety of interesting signals in both terrestrial and astrophysical observables. I'll walk through some minimal cosmological origin stories for such dark sectors and explore their consequences for where and how we might look for the footprints of dark states today.