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High Energy Physics Seminar - Vincent Lee (UC San Diego) "The Dark Dimension, Revisited"

Speaker: Vincent Lee (UC San Diego)
Date: 10/30/2026
Time: 11 a.m.
Location: Rhondale Tso Seminar Room, Loomis 236
Event Contact: Brandy Koebbe
bkoebbe@illinois.edu
Sponsor: Physics Department
Event Type: Seminar/Symposium
 

Motivated by the swampland program, it has been proposed that a tower of massive Kaluza-Klein (KK) gravitons from a compactified flat extra dimension can be dark matter, with the heavier modes constantly cascading to lighter ones. The phenomenology crucially depends on the rate at which a massive KK mode decays to lighter modes. We show that, up to mild assumptions on the UV theory, the decay rate is suppressed by a factor of (q/m)^4 compared to the one commonly used in the literature, where q is the momentum of the decay products and m is the mass of the decaying KK mode. This suggests that the proposed scenario is ruled out by CMB observations by many orders of magnitude. Remarkably, the same suppression opens up a vastly different parameter space in which KK gravitons from a strongly warped extra dimension (e.g. a Randall-Sundrum setup) are a viable dark matter candidate, either as the cascading gravitons themselves or as a stable component of the tower.