Jet and Dark Substructure

We currently live in the golden age of experimental particle physics.  The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) finally discovered the Higgs particle and may soon allow us to probe TeV-scale new physics.  Moreover, dark matter indirect detection experiments may have found annihilation products in our galaxy while the direct detection experiments keep improving their upper bounds on dark matter interactions with ordinary matter.  That being said, the current efforts to discover any physics beyond the standard model have failed.  We thus need to come up with better models and better tools to probe new physics.  This thesis which collects the author's PhD research papers is an effort in this direction.

We begin by showing how singular dark matter self-interaction can significantly enhance dark matter annihilation in today's Universe.  Then we explore a concrete dark matter model where a particle called the dilaton mediate the interactions between the dark sector and the standard model.  Finally we devise a new method to discern heavy boosted particles from QCD jets at the LHC.  

Advisor: Csaba Csaki