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 possibilities. A major focus of upcoming DM searches involves light dark matter (LDM): a new class of candidates with masses on the MeV to GeV scale, characterized by a massive dark photon which mixes kinetically with the SM photon. LDM is often taken to readily interact with regular matter in the early Universe. This produces 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, we find that the inclusion of a dark Higgs as an explicit source of the associated symmetry breaking can significantly affect cosmological predictions for complex scalar DM. In particular, a light dark Higgs tends to shift predictions away from existing bounds, and in some scenarios beyond the reach of upcoming experiments. We present the effects of such a dark Higgs on detection prospects for accelerator-based and direct-detection experiments.