In anomaly-mediated supersymmetry breaking, superpartners in a hidden sector have masses that are proportional to couplings squared and so naturally freeze out with the desired dark matter relic density for a large range of masses. We present an extremely simple realization of this possibility, with WIMPless dark matter arising from a hidden sector that is supersymmetric QED with NF flavors. Dark matter is multicomponent, composed of hidden leptons and sleptons with masses anywhere from 10 GeV to 10 TeV, and hidden photons provide the thermal bath. The dark matter self-interacts through hidden sector Coulomb scatterings that are potentially observable. In addition, the hidden photon contribution to the number of relativistic degrees of freedom is in the range ΔNeff∼0-2, and, if the hidden and visible sectors were initially in thermal contact, the model predicts ΔN eff∼0.2-0.4. Data already taken by Planck may provide evidence of such deviations. © 2011 American Physical Society.

We present a model with dark matter in an anomaly-mediated supersymmetry breaking hidden sector with a U(1)×U(1) gauge symmetry. The symmetries of the model stabilize the dark matter and forbid the introduction of new mass parameters. As a result, the thermal relic density is completely determined by the gravitino mass and dimensionless couplings. Assuming nonhierarchical couplings, the thermal relic density is Ω X∼0.1, independent of the dark matter's mass and interaction strength, realizing the WIMPless miracle. The model has several striking features. For particle physics, stability of the dark matter is completely consistent with R-parity violation in the visible sector, with implications for superpartner collider signatures; also the thermal relic's mass may be ∼10GeV or lighter, which is of interest given recent direct detection results. Interesting astrophysical signatures are dark matter self-interactions through a long-range force, and massless hidden photons and fermions that contribute to the number of relativistic degrees of freedom at big bang nucleosynthesis and cosmic microwave background. The latter are particularly interesting, given current indications for extra degrees of freedom and near future results from the Planck observatory. © 2012 American Physical Society.

Recent indications of a 125 GeV Higgs boson are challenging for gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking, since radiative contributions to the Higgs boson mass are not enhanced by significant stop mixing. This challenge should not be considered in isolation, however, as gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking also generically suffers from two other problems: unsuppressed electric dipole moments (EDMs) and the absence of an attractive dark matter candidate. We show that all of these problems may be simultaneously solved by considering heavy superpartners, without extra fields or modified cosmology. Multi-TeV sfermions suppress the EDMs and raise the Higgs mass, and the dark matter problem is solved by "Goldilocks" cosmology, in which TeV neutralinos decay to GeV gravitinos that are simultaneously light enough to solve the flavor problem and heavy enough to be all of dark matter. The implications for collider searches and direct and indirect dark matter detection are sobering, but EDMs are expected near their current bounds, and the resulting nonthermal gravitino dark matter is necessarily warm, with testable cosmological implications. © 2012 American Physical Society.

We explore the coupling of the strange quark to the state of mass close to 126 GeV recently observed by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC. An enhanced coupling relative to the expectations for a SM Higgs has the effect of increasing both the inclusive production cross section and the partial decay width into jets. For very large modifications, the latter dominates and the net rate into non-jet decay modes such as diphotons is suppressed, with the result that one can use observations of the diphoton decay mode to place an upper limit on the strange quark coupling. We find that the current observations of the diphoton decay mode imply that the coupling of the new resonance to strange quarks can be at most ∼ 50 times the SM expectation at the 95% C.L., if one assumes at most a O(1) modification of the coupling to gluons. © 2013 SISSA.