Dark matter and flavor.

by Fady Bishara (Cincinnati U and Fermilab)

Thursday 18 Dec 2014, 12:00 → 13:00 Europe/Madrid

IFAE Seminar room (IFAE)

We show that flavor symmetries can lead to dark matter stability without the need to impose additional discrete or continuous symmetries specifically for this purpose. We explore two scenarios. In the first, the metastability of asymmetric dark matter (ADM) derives from the breaking of continuous flavor symmetries. We show that, for ADM that carries nonzero baryon number, the continuous flavor symmetries that generate the flavor structure in the quark sector also imply a looser lower bound on the mass scale of the asymmetric mediators between the dark and visible sectors. We show that the mediators for B = 2 ADM can be of O(TeV) and can thus be searched for at the LHC. In the second scenario we show that flavor triality protects dark matter from decay even with non-MFV flavor breaking. We show that there is a viable region in parameter space where we obtain the correct thermal relic density while satisfying bounds from direct searches for the mediators at the LHC and low energy flavor observables.