How inelastic are WIMPs?

by Giovani Dalla Valle Garcia (University of Melbourne)

Thursday 16 Apr 2026, 16:00 → 17:00 Australia/Sydney

G59 (UNSW Old Main Building)

In this talk, I explore the idea that dark matter (DM) is composed of WIMPs — more precisely, thermal freeze-out particles — and assess which WIMP scenarios remain viable after decades of experimental searches. In particular, inelastic dark matter (iDM) models represent a slightly modified WIMP scenario that can still produce DM via freeze-out, while evading stringent constraints from direct and indirect detection. These models remain promising candidates across a wide variety of experiments, from colliders to cosmological probes, with highly distinctive signatures. I will explain the general principles of iDM and generalize standard cases from the literature by allowing for both elastic and inelastic interactions — corresponding to different levels of parity violation. Within this generalized framework, I will show how this relaxes several constraints present in the standard iDM scenario, while still predicting novel collider signals.