“Quirks Live in Cool Universes"

“Quirks” arise when a new dark sector contains matter that transforms under both the SM and a new non-Abelian confining force. When the confinement scale is much smaller than the mass of the matter, quirks exhibit exotic macroscopic behavior that is completely unlike other new physics signals. The lightest state of the theory is a glueball, which can be exceptionally long-lived.  If the long-lived glueballs are produced in the early Universe, they can dramatically alter cosmology.  I'll discuss the abundance of dark glue and dark glueballs, how they decay, and the (dangerous) astrophysical signals that they produce.  The result will be that if quirks were observed at the LHC, avoiding the glueball constraints requires the reheat temperature of the universe to be highly constrained, less than 100 GeV, and in some regions of parameter space, less than 100 MeV.