Asymmetric Dark Matter May Not Be Light

It is often said that asymmetric dark matter is light compared to typical weakly interacting massive particles. Here we point out a simple scheme with a neutrino portal and $\mathcal{O}(60 \text{ GeV})$ asymmetric dark matter which may be ''added'' to any standard baryogenesis scenario. The dark sector contains a copy of the Standard Model gauge group, as well as (at least) one matter family, Higgs, and right-handed neutrino. After baryogenesis, some lepton asymmetry is transferred to the dark sector through the neutrino portal where dark sphalerons convert it into a dark baryon asymmetry. Dark hadrons form asymmetric dark matter and may be directly detected due to the vector portal. Surprisingly, even dark anti-neutrons may be directly detected if they have a sizeable electric dipole moment. The dark photons visibly decay at current and future experiments which probe complementary parameter space to dark matter direct detection searches. Exotic Higgs decays are excellent signals at future $e^+ e^-$ Higgs factories.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

Using Graviton EFT and Massive Gravity to Compute Gravitational Potentials for Black Hole Inspirals

This year, the LIGO detectors entered their third observing run and have been detecting black hole interactions with increasing precision and sensitivity. These detections have opened up a new way to compare the predictions of Einsteinian gravity with more exotic models. One of these models, massive gravity, is a concrete toy to use in testing these predictions. This project uses ideas from EFT and standard techniques from quantum field theory to calculate scattering amplitudes for scalar particles interacting via gravitons. We first calculated amplitudes up to the 1-looplevel assuming the standard massless graviton and then assuming a massive graviton. We then mapped these amplitudes to gravitational potentials for black holes. Future work will include looking at the different predictions of these two theories (massless and massive gravitons), and comparing them to black hole inspiral data to determine if the massive graviton theory could be a legitimate contender as a model for gravity

translin Is Required for Metabolic Regulation of Sleep

Dysregulation of sleep or feeding has enormous health consequences. In humans, acute sleep loss is associated with increased appetite and insulin insensitivity, while chronically sleep-deprived individuals are more likely to develop obesity, metabolic syndrome, type II diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Conversely, metabolic state potently modulates sleep and circadian behavior; yet, the molecular basis for sleep-metabolism interactions remains poorly understood. Here, we describe the identification of translin (trsn), a highly conserved RNA/DNA binding protein, as essential for starvation-induced sleep suppression. Strikingly, trsn does not appear to regulate energy stores, free glucose levels, or feeding behavior suggesting the sleep phenotype of trsn mutant flies is not a consequence of general metabolic dysfunction or blunted response to starvation. While broadly expressed in all neurons, trsn is transcriptionally upregulated in the heads of flies in response to starvation. Spatially restricted rescue or targeted knockdown localizes trsn function to neurons that produce the tachykinin family neuropeptide Leucokinin. Manipulation of neural activity in Leucokinin neurons revealed these neurons to be required for starvation-induced sleep suppression. Taken together, these findings establish trsn as an essential integrator of sleep and metabolic state, with implications for understanding the neural mechanism underlying sleep disruption in response to environmental perturbation