High Energy Theory Seminar

I will briefly review our current experimental knowledge of dark matter and then discuss recent developments in model building. In particular I will show that dark matter can be a thermal relic exponentially lighter than the weak scale without being exponentially weakly coupled. I will discuss concrete examples of light thermal dark matter with sizable self-interactions and observable couplings to the Standard Model. The focus will be on how minimal deformations of the WIMP paradigm produce vastly different phenomenological consequences.