JOINT PARTICLE SEMINAR



Date: Wednesday,  30 November 2005   Time: 3:00 p.m.

Place: 4135 Frederick Reines Hall

Speaker: Ian Low, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Title: Grand Unification, Dark Matter, Baryon Asymmetry, and the Small Scale Structure of the Universe

Abstract: We consider a framework where the dark matter arises from non-thermal decays of a messenger particle in the TeV range. The messenger particle compensates for the baryon asymmetry in the standard model and gives similar number densities to both the baryon and the dark matter. The non-thermal dark matter, if massive in the GeV range, could have a free-streaming scale in the order of 0.1 Mpc and potentially resolve the discrepancies between observations and the LCDM model on the small scale structure of the Universe. Moreover, a GeV scale dark matter naturally leads to the observed puzzling proximity of baryonic and dark matter densities. Unification of gauge couplings can also be achieved in a version of the model.

Host: J. Feng