Rich Phenomenology from Simple Ingredients: A Review of Confining Dark Sectors

Abstract

We review theories with confining dark sectors and their implications for dark matter, cosmology, phenomenology, and unsolved Standard Model puzzles. Models with new strongly-coupled non-Abelian gauge interactions can lead to a variety of dark matter candidates (dark mesons, baryons, glueballs, etc.), as well as mechanisms to generate its abundance and symmetries that explain its stability. There are also many potential discovery channels, including direct detection, indirect detection, astrophysical observables, and colliders, as well as correlations between different experiments. We compile a broad conceptual overview of the literature on this topic, aimed at both theorists looking for which questions remain unanswered and experimentalists looking for novel search opportunities. While the theoretical landscape is vast, there are both unifying features and calculational techniques that apply to various regimes. We particularly highlight applications to explaining the similarity of visible and dark matter energy densities, i.e. the $abundance~similarity~puzzle$. We advocate further exploration of this class of theories in the effort to uncover physics beyond the Standard Model.