Speaker
Description
In this talk, I will discuss minimal realizations of light thermal dark matter (DM) candidates. These scenarios typically require a light mediator to ensure sufficient DM annihilation rates. We demonstrate that such mediators can arise from additional Higgs doublet(s). Within this framework, we focus on two specific scenarios: (1) Forbidden DM, where DM predominantly annihilates into SM charged leptons through kinematically forbidden channels, and (2) Neutrinophilic DM, where neutrinos serve as the primary annihilation products. In both cases, all BSM states lie at or below electroweak scale, making these models testable at upcoming colliders, beam-dump experiments, future sub-GeV gamma-ray telescopes, and next-generation neutrino detectors.
