Can WIMP Dark Matter overcome the Nightmare Scenario?

Even if new physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) indeed exists, the energy scale of new physics might be beyond the reach at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the LHC could find only the Higgs boson but nothing else. This is the so-called "nightmare scenario". On the other hand, the existence of the dark matter has been established from various observations. One of the promising candidates for thermal relic dark matter is a stable and electric charge-neutral Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) with the mass below the TeV scale. In the nightmare scenario, we introduce a WIMP dark matter singlet under the SM gauge group, which only couples to the Higgs doublet at the lowest order, and investigate a possibility that such WIMP dark matter can be a clue to overcome the nightmare scenario via various phenomenological tests such as the dark matter relic abundance, the direct detection experiments for the dark matter particle, and the production of the dark matter particle at the LHC.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figure

Whitepaper on Super-weakly Interacting Massive Particles for Snowmass 2013

Super-weakly interacting massive particles produced in the late decays of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are generic in large regions of supersymmetric parameter space and other frameworks for physics beyond the standard model. If their masses are similar to that of the decaying WIMP, then they could naturally account for all of the cosmological dark matter abundance. Their astrophysical consequences and collider signatures are distinct and different from WIMP candidates. In particular, they could modify Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, distort the Cosmic Microwave Background, reduce galactic substructure and lower central densities of low-mass galaxies.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, white paper for Snowmass 201

Dark Matter Phenomenology

I review recent developments in the direct and indirect detection of dark matter and new candidates beyond the WIMP paradigm.Comment: 6 pages, to appear in the Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics (CIPANP 2009), San Diego, California, 26-31 May 200

GLAST Dark Matter Search

The GLAST Large Area Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2006, is a next generation space based gamma ray telescope which will improve in point source sensitivity by a factor of 30 over that of EGRET below 10 GeV, and extend beyond EGRET up to 300 GeV. Thus GLAST offers a unique opportunity to discover WIMP dark matter through precision studies of gamma rays produced in pair annihilations. The most dense region of dark matter in our galaxy is currently thought to occur at the center; in particular, dark matter should concentrate within 3 pc of the putative supermassive black hole located at the SgrA* radio source. In fact, the 2nd and 3rd EGRET catalogs contain a significant point source coincident with the Milky Way galactic center within a resolution of 12 arcminutes. The EGRET team has determined that the spectral and temporal characteristics of this point source are consistent with dark matter WIMP annihilations. More detailed analysis has determined that the magnitude and spectrum of the EGRET source is consistent with relic WIMPs concentrated within 3 pc of the central supermassive black hole. Furthermore, the SgrA* radio emission is consistent with the synchrotron radiation expected from electrons and positrons produced in WIMP annihilations. If true, then GLAST should be able to constrain the particle properties of the postulated WIMP with 1 month of data.Comment: Poster at the XXII Physics in Collisions Conference (PIC02), Stanford, Ca, USA, June 2002, 3 pages, LaTeX, 2 eps figures. PSN THAP0