Accelerating Our Understanding Of A Dark Sector

Synopsis

The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics-archive describes the known elementary particles and the forces that mediate their interactions. An emerging paradigm in particle physics-archive is the possibility that new matter resides in its own sector, a Dark Sector (DS), is uncharged under the known forces in the SM, but exhibits some of the complexity of the latter. In this talk I will explain the rationale for studying this framework, including the possibility that Dark Matter (DM) could be lighter than in the canonical case of a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP). Viable models of light DM can be accommodated within the DS framework, and these remain largely unexplored by current and previous experiments. I will then discuss new ideas for testing this paradigm at the Large Hadron Collider.