Speaker
Description
I will present the construction and phenomenology of novel portals between the Standard Model and dark sectors, arising from topological operators in chiral perturbation theory. The first example is based on a mixed Wess–Zumino–Witten term that uniquely connects three QCD pions to two dark pions, leading to a consistent framework for light thermal inelastic dark matter with suppressed direct and indirect detection, but distinctive collider signatures. The second example is a minimal model in which gauging the topological Skyrme current naturally links a QCD-like dark sector to the Standard Model, allowing a semi-annihilation process that sets the relic abundance. The purely p-wave nature of these interactions ensures compatibility with existing constraints while offering discovery prospects at colliders and beam-dump experiments.