Speaker
Description
This talk gives a unified perspective on the phase transitions, gravitational waves, and dark matter detection prospects of strongly coupled dark sectors. I first review lattice-informed effective descriptions of dark confinement and chiral dynamics, and show how the resulting first-order transitions generate observable gravitational wave signals, strongest in the near-conformal, strongly supercooled regime. I then point out that the self-consistent 2PI/CJT dressing forced upon us by strong coupling in the dark sector and partial dressing in the perturbative regime are the same prescription — a dressed propagator with a tree-level vertex — whereas the Parwani and Arnold–Espinosa schemes standard in the gravitational wave literature are truncated full dressing. We give a multi-field, scan-ready implementation and quantify the difference in conformal and non-conformal two-Higgs-doublet models: in the conformal case it systematically yields stronger, more supercooled transitions and the largest peak amplitudes, while in the non-conformal case the dependence is more intricate and can even reassign the thermal history of the same zero-temperature point. Once the tree-level curvature vanishes, the barrier is generated entirely by the resummed self-energy, so the prescription no longer corrects the answer but determines it — exactly the regime where dark-sector transitions live. Building on this, I discuss the non-perturbative thermal evolution of the dark gluon–glueball system and the controlled prediction of the glueball dark matter relic abundance, composite glueball axion-like particles from the θ term and heavy fermion portals, and recent progress matching ultraviolet portal operators onto non-perturbative glueball amplitudes through a tensor-Pomeron-inspired effective field theory, opening a quantitative path to direct detection.