HEP Theory Journal Club

Connecting B-physics anomalies to dark matter

Jonathan Cornell

McGill

While there have been no definite signals of the production of non-standard model particles at the LHC, there are growing hints of new physics in the flavour physics results from LHCb, particularly in deviations from lepton flavour universality in the semileptonic decays of the b-quark. In this talk, I will give an overview of the current status of these anomalies and then describe two simple models which could explain them: a Z' model and a model with additional fermions and scalars which gives additional contributions at loop level to the decays. In both cases a dark matter candidate can be easily incorporated into the model, and I will discuss how this dark matter particle could also explain two sets of astrophysical anomalies: an excess of gamma-rays at the centre of the Milky Way and deviations from expectations in the measured spectrum of cosmic anti-protons.