Theory HEP Seminar

Hidden Surprises in Dark Matter

David Morrissey

TRIUMF

The PAMELA and Fermi/GLAST cosmic ray telescopes have recently observed fluxes of high energy leptons and photons significantly above the expectations from simple astrophysical estimates. A potential source for these excess cosmic rays is the annihilation of dark matter within our galaxy. The DAMA experiments also find an unexplained annual modulation of nuclear recoils in their detector that could possibly arise from scattering with dark matter particles. Traditional models for dark matter are unable to explain these new results. However, dark matter that couples to a new hidden gauge force with a characteristic mass scale near 1 GeV can account for the data. In this talk I will describe these exciting and surprising new experimental results, discuss how they can be explained by a new dark matter particle coupling to a light GeV-scale hidden sector, exhibit how such a scenario can be related to supersymmetry breaking, and outline ways we might discover such hidden particles in upcoming collider experiments and astrophysical measurements.