Speaker: Douglas Tuckler
Null results from experimental searches for weak scale DM has motivated going beyond the WIMP paradigm of thermal dark matter. Over the past decade, the experimental search effort for dark matter has greatly expanded in scope to explore the sub-GeV regime, with many new detection strategies being proposed to search for light dark matter. Among the most promising search strategies are fixed-target missing momentum techniques, in which an electron beam is passed through a thin target, and the beam energy and momentum is measured on both sides of the target. In this talk, I will give an overview of missing momentum techniques and how they have the potential to probe nearly every model of sub-GeV freeze-out (i.e. thermal DM). I will also discuss how missing momentum techniques can be used to characterize DM if a signal is observed. I will show that, with slight modifications to the beam parameters, missing momentum experiments are able to determine the mass and Lorentz structure of DM and particles that mediate DM interactions with the SM.