Speaker
Description
This talk presents a unified discussion of glueball dark matter and related composite states in confining dark Yang–Mills sectors. I will first review lattice-inspired effective descriptions of dark confinement and chiral dynamics, and show how the associated phase transitions can lead to potentially observable gravitational-wave signals, especially in fermionic and near-conformal regimes. I will then discuss the nonperturbative thermal evolution of the dark-gluon–glueball system and its implications for controlled predictions of scalar glueball dark matter relic abundance. Building on this framework, I will introduce composite glueball axion-like particles generated by θ terms and heavy-fermion portals, as well as recent progress in direct detection based on a tensor-Pomeron-inspired effective field theory. This approach matches ultraviolet portal operators to nonperturbative glueball amplitudes and provides a quantitative path toward recoil searches and light-portal scenarios consistent with collider constraints. Overall, the framework connects dark confinement, cosmological evolution, and experimental probes of strongly coupled dark sectors.
