Speaker
Description
The microscopic nature of dark matter is the major open question in science. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) and Axion-Like Particles (ALPs) are the two most theoretically motivated dark matter candidates. Thousands of papers consider them separately. We point out that if both species are present in the theory, even a tiny (Planck-suppressed) interaction between them can lead to drastic modifications of their dynamics in the early Universe. This can dramatically change predicted properties of WIMP and ALP dark matter particles, such as their masses and annihilation cross sections. This in turn leads to important consequences for experiments searching for particle dark matter.
The talk is based on our recent work: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16731.