Andreas Birkedal

Dark matter at colliders: A Model independent approach

Assuming that cosmological dark matter consists of weakly interacting massive particles, we use the recent precise measurement of cosmological parameters to predict the guaranteed rates of production of such particles in association with photons at electron-positron colliders. Our approach is based on general physical principles such as detailed balancing and soft/collinear factorization. It leads to predictions that are valid across a broad range of models containing WIMPs, including supersymmetry, universal extra dimensions, and many others. We also discuss the discovery prospects for the predicted experimental signatures.

Little Higgs dark matter

The introduction of T parity dramatically improves the consistency of little Higgs models with precision electroweak data, and renders the lightest T-odd particle (LTP) stable. In the littlest Higgs model with T parity, the LTP is typically the T-odd heavy photon, which is weakly interacting and can play the role of dark matter. We analyze the relic abundance of the heavy photon, including its coannihilations with other T-odd particles, and map out the regions of the parameter space where it can account for the observed dark matter. We evaluate the prospects for direct and indirect discovery of the heavy photon dark matter. The direct detection rates are quite low and a substantial improvement in experimental sensitivity would be required for observation. A substantial flux of energetic gamma rays is produced in the annihilation of the heavy photons in the galactic halo. This flux can be observed by the GLAST telescope, and, if the distribution of dark matter in the halo is favorable, by ground-based telescope arrays such as VERITAS and HESS.

Collider Phenomenology of the Higgsless Models

We identify and study the signatures of the recently proposed Higgsless models at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We concentrate on tests of the mechanism of partial unitarity restoration in the longitudinal vector boson scattering, which is crucial to the phenomenological success of any Higgsless model and does not depend on the model-building details. We investigate the discovery reach for charged massive vector boson resonances and show that all of the preferred parameter space will be probed with 100 fb(-1) of LHC data. Unitarity restoration requires that the masses and couplings of the resonances obey certain sum rules. We discuss the prospects for their experimental verification at the LHC.