Speaker
Description
In the continued search for dark matter (DM), community interest has extended beyond the standard weakly-interacting-massive-particle paradigm to a richer set of scenarios and detection opportunities. A major focus of upcoming DM searches involves light dark matter (LDM): a class of candidates with masses on the electron to proton scale, characterized by a massive dark photon which mixes kinetically with the regular photon. LDM is often taken to readily interact with regular matter in the early Universe. This scenario yields cosmological predictions for rates of DM interaction or production in today's experiments, with scalar candidates being particularly well-constrained. While the origin of the dark photon's mass is often left unspecified, the inclusion of a dark Higgs as an explicit source of the associated symmetry breaking can significantly affect cosmological predictions for complex scalar DM. Additionally, large dark-sector couplings are generally allowed and often preferred in order to avoid experimental bounds. Such scenarios necessarily result in substantial radiative corrections which are affected significantly by the characteristics of the dark Higgs. We present the effects of such corrections on detection prospects for accelerator-based and direct-detection experiments.