HET BROWN BAG SEMINAR | The Vector Portal: A Window to a Dark Sector

An emerging paradigm in particle physics is the possibility that new matter resides in its own sector — a Dark Sector (DS) —  connected to the Standard Model via a portal. In this talk I will focus on a well-motivated example of such a scenario: the vector portal. I will discuss two distinct phases of the theory. In one, matter in the DS is uncharged under the known forces and is a viable candidate for light Dark Matter. In the other phase of this framework, matter in the DS can instead acquire a non-quantized electromagnetic charge. Finally, I describe proposals for new small-scale experiments to sharply test the different phases of the vector portal.