Phenomenology 2026 Symposium

Session

New Developments in BSM Searches

11 May 2026, 14:15

University of Pittsburgh

293. Improved supernova bounds on CP-even scalars: cooling and decay constraints

Anirudhan Alanthatta Madathil (University of Utah)

11/05/2026, 14:15

Supernovae provide among the most powerful probes of weakly-coupled new particles in the MeV mass range, where laboratory experiments lose sensitivity. In this work, we constrain the mixing angle $\sin \theta$ of a Higgs mixed scalar to five orders of magnitude below the existing collider bounds ($\sin \theta \sim 10^{-9}$) using an improved supernovae cooling bound and with new decay-based...

402. Higher Axions

Arthur Platschorre (Cornell University)

11/05/2026, 14:30

A large fraction of the experimental efforts searching for the (QCD) axion focus on smaller-scale, time-intensive, resonant searches. These searches would greatly benefit from a precise estimate of the axion mass. In theory, the axion mass can be inferred from the observed dark matter abundance and numerical simulations point towards an axion mass (slightly) higher than currently searched for....

320. Composite Quarks and Leptons: Flavor Signatures of a Preon Theory

Amartya Sengupta (The University at Buffalo, SUNY, USA)

11/05/2026, 14:45

We discuss a renormalizable composite SU(15) model in which the Standard Model quarks, leptons, and the Higgs arise as bound states of an underlying confining chiral gauge theory. Symmetries and large-(N) power counting naturally suppress baryon-number violation, allowing compositeness scales as low as (10^{4},TeV) while remaining consistent with proton-decay bounds. We focus on the flavor...

282. Large-Width New Physics at Colliders: A Gauge-Invariant Resummation Approach

Yin-Fa Shen (Vanderbilt University (US))

11/05/2026, 15:00

Broad resonances challenge the standard Monte-Carlo treatment of unstable particles, which introduces a Breit–Wigner width into leading-order matrix elements and can generate unphysical gauge artifacts. We develop a gauge-consistent framework that combines a Dyson-resummed propagator with Slavnov–Taylor-identity–implied resummed vertices, enabling a consistent implementation in MadGraph5. In...

478. Ubiquitous Corotation of Dark Matter Halos: Implications for Direct Detection

Dylan Folsom (Princeton University)

11/05/2026, 15:15

Dark Matter Theory and Detection

The ability of direct detection experiments to constrain dark matter properties depends sensitively on the phase-space distribution of dark matter near the Sun, which can be modeled theoretically with hydrodynamical simulations of Milky Way–like galaxies. In this work, we use a sample of nearly one hundred such galaxies from the TNG50 simulation to characterize the expected phase-space...

272. Hidden-Heavy Pentaquarks and Where to Find Them

Fareed Alasiri

11/05/2026, 15:30

The unexpected discovery of dozens of exotic heavy hadrons since 2003 has provided a major challenge to our understanding of QCD. Among the zoo of exotic hadrons are 3 hidden-charm pentaquarks and 2 strange hidden-charm pentaquarks, only one of whose quantum numbers has been determined. We provide a simple explanation for the observed hidden-charm pentaquarks as bound states in...

399. Phenomenological MSSM interpretation of CMS Run 2 searches

Aleesha Kallil Tharayil (Carnegie-Mellon University (US))

11/05/2026, 15:45

Results are presented for the combination of CMS Run 2 searches for new physics, interpreted in the framework of the phenomenological MSSM (pMSSM) via a scan over its 19-dimensional parameter space, using 138 fb⁻¹ of proton-proton collision data collected at 13 TeV. A global Bayesian analysis is performed, using a likelihood-based Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach incorporating data...