News & Events

Marianne Moore (MIT)

Event Details

McDonald Institute Seminar Series

Location: STI 501

Date: January 8, 2024

Time: 2:30pm - 3:30pm

Title: On the cosmology and terrestrial signals of sexaquark dark matter

The sexaquark, a hypothetical stable and neutral six-quark state, has been recently proposed as a dark matter candidate. Here, I argue it is very unlikely sexaquarks could consistently compose more than a billionth of the dark matter abundance for a wide range of scattering cross sections and annihilation rates. To draw these conclusions, I will connect several topics, including the sexaquark freeze-out abundance, dark matter direct detection constraints, neutrino experiments, and accumulation mechanisms for sexaquarks in the Earth. I will show how the sexaquark cosmology enforces that a large contribution to dark matter is only possible with a similarly large antisexaquark population. This population, however, would leave a stark annihilation signal in a detector such as Super-Kamiokande. I will summarize with how sexaquarks as a large component of the dark matter is incompatible with current observational data.

The McDonald Institute seminar will be held in Stirling 501. A zoom link is also available and was shared via email from Aaron Vincent. Please reach out to him to get access.