Event Details

In the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic, the inhabitants of the cave are only able to deduce the nature and structure of the wider world through the shadows produced by statues of objects and animals from the outside. Our understanding of Dark Matter (DM) is in a similar state: we can see the indirect effects of DM but without hints of it in experiments, we are resigned to guessing if these shadows are due to a WIMP, or if the dark sector is really as rich as the SM. I will review a concept dubbed ‘Plato’s Fire’ where the non-Abelian discrete group A4, which is the symmetry group of the tetrahedron, is utilized to predict the tribimaximal neutrino oscillation pattern. By building radiative models of neutrino mass, where the dark sector particles generate neutrino mass through loops, I will discuss how it is possible to generate a more realistic neutrino mass matrix. By utilizing T’ instead of A4 it is also possible to generate a non-trivial quark mixing matrix, where the T’ is softly broken by dimension three terms to a residual Z4 symmetry. Notably, this radiative T’ model can have multiple constituents of cosmological DM. In addition, there are new colored fermions that are vector-like under the SM gauge group. These additional fermions could be produced at the LHC with a subsequent decay chain that is distinct from existing vectorlike quark searches.

Video Recording