Recent advancements in Hidden Valley models

Hidden Valley models are characterized by a new low energy confining sector that communicates with the Standard Model via some heavy mediators. These models present many interesting theoretical characteristics, such as the ability to explain dark matter, and lead to new exotic collider signatures. After a brief review of the subject, I will present recent work by my collaborators and I on different aspects of Hidden Valley models. In the first part, I will discuss scalar and fermion Hidden Valley mediators at colliders. Under the assumption that these mediators decay via some renormalizable operator, the possible collider signatures can be classified into five distinct categories. I will provide an overview of current experimental constraints on these mediators and propose new search strategies. In the second part, I will consider dark sectors whose spectra of light particles consists of both stable and unstable dark pions as a possible explanation for dark matter. I will show that large regions of parameter space avoid bounds from direct and indirect detection and map this space to collider signatures.