The problems of simple elementary weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) appeal to extend the physical basis for nonbaryonic dark matter. Such extension involves more sophisticated dark matter candidates from physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) of elementary particles. We discuss several models of dark matter, predicting new colored, hyper-colored or techni-colored particles and their accelerator and non-accelerator probes. The nontrivial properties of the proposed dark matter candidates can shed new light on the dark matter physics. They provide interesting solutions for the puzzles of direct and indirect dark matter search.

The history of dark universe physics can be traced from processes in the very early universe to the modern dominance of dark matter and energy. Here, we review the possible nontrivial role of strong interactions in cosmological effects of new physics. In the case of ordinary QCD interaction, the existence of new stable colored particles such as new stable quarks leads to new exotic forms of matter, some of which can be candidates for dark matter. New QCD-like strong interactions lead to new stable composite candidates bound by QCD-like confinement. We put special emphasis on the effects of interaction between new stable hadrons and ordinary matter, formation of anomalous forms of cosmic rays and exotic forms of matter, like stable fractionally charged particles. The possible correlation of these effects with high energy neutrino and cosmic ray signatures opens the way to study new physics of strong interactions by its indirect multi-messenger astrophysical probes.

Most of the traditional technicolor-based models are known to be in a strong tension with the electroweak precision tests. We show that this serious issue is naturally cured in strongly coupled sectors with chiral-symmetric vectorlike gauge interactions in the framework of the gauged linear $\sigma$ model. We discuss possible phenomenological implications of such a nonstandard chiral-symmetric technicolor scenario in its simplest formulation preserving the standard model (SM) Higgs mechanism. For this purpose, we assume the existence of an extra technifermion sector confined under extra $SU(3{)}_{\mathrm{TC}}$ at the energy scales reachable at the LHC, ${\Lambda }_{\mathrm{TC}}\sim 0.1–1\mathrm{TeV}$ and interacting with the SM gauge bosons in a chiral-symmetric (vectorlike) way. In the framework of this scenario, the SM Higgs vacuum expectation value acquires a natural interpretation in terms of the condensate of technifermions in confinement in the nearly conformal limit. We study the influence of the lowest-lying composite physical states, namely, technipions, technisigma, and constituent technifermions, on the Higgs sector properties in the SM and other observables at the LHC. We find that the predicted Higgs boson signal strengths in $\gamma \gamma$, vector-boson $V{V}^{*}$, and fermion $f\overline{f}$ decay channels can be sensitive to the new strongly coupled dynamics and are consistent with the current SM-like Higgs boson observations in the limit of relatively small Higgs-technisigma mixing. At the same time, the chiral-symmetric technicolor provides us with rich technipion phenomenology at the LHC, and its major implications are discussed in detail. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.88.075009 © 2013 American Physical Society

One of the specific predictions of a new strongly coupled dynamics at a TeV scale is the existence of stable vector-like technibaryon states so that the lightest neutral one could serve as a Dark Matter candidate. We study the latter hypothesis in the QCD-type technicolor with \(\mathrm{SU}(3)_\mathrm{TC}\) confined group and one \(\mathrm{SU}(2)_\mathrm{W}\) doublet of vector-like techniquarks consistent with electroweak precision constraints and test it against the existing Dark Matter astrophysics data. We discuss the most stringent Dark Matter constraints on weak interactions of technibaryons in \(\mathrm{SU}(3)_\mathrm{TC}\) technicolor and possible implications of these findings for the cosmological evolution of relic technineutrons. We conclude that vector-like techniquark sectors with an odd group of confinement \(\mathrm{SU}(2n+1)_\mathrm{TC}, n=1,2,\ldots \) and with ordinary vector-like weak \(\mathrm{SU}(2)_\mathrm{W}\) interactions are excluded by XENON100 data under the assumption of technibaryon number conservation in the modern Universe allowing for an even technicolor group \(\mathrm{SU}(2n)_\mathrm{TC}\) only.