Dark sectors, consisting of new, light, weakly-coupled particles that do not interact with the known strong, weak, or electromagnetic forces, are a particularly compelling possibility for new physics. Nature may contain numerous dark sectors, each with their own beautiful structure, distinct particles, and forces. This review summarizes the physics motivation for dark sectors and the exciting opportunities for experimental exploration. It is the summary of the Intensity Frontier subgroup "New, Light, Weakly-coupled Particles" of the Community Summer Study 2013 (Snowmass). We discuss axions, which solve the strong CP problem and are an excellent dark matter candidate, and their generalization to axion-like particles. We also review dark photons and other dark-sector particles, including sub-GeV dark matter, which are theoretically natural, provide for dark matter candidates or new dark matter interactions, and could resolve outstanding puzzles in particle and astro-particle physics. In many cases, the exploration of dark sectors can proceed with existing facilities and comparatively modest experiments. A rich, diverse, and lowcost experimental program has been identified that has the potential for one or more game-changing discoveries. These physics opportunities should be vigorously pursued in the US and elsewhere.

In this paper, we review recent theoretical progress and the latest experimental results in jet substructure from the Tevatron and the LHC. We review the status of and outlook for calculation and simulation tools for studying jet substructure. Following up on the report of the Boost 2010 workshop, we present a new set of benchmark comparisons of substructure techniques, focusing on the set of variables and grooming methods that are collectively known as 'top taggers'. To facilitate further exploration, we have attempted to collect, harmonize and publish software implementations of these techniques.

Particles beyond the Standard Model (SM) can generically have lifetimes that are long compared to SM particles at the weak scale. When produced at experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, these long-lived particles (LLPs) can decay far from the interaction vertex of the primary proton–proton collision. Such LLP signatures are distinct from those of promptly decaying particles that are targeted by the majority of searches for new physics at the LHC, often requiring customized techniques to identify, for example, significantly displaced decay vertices, tracks with atypical properties, and short track segments. Given their non-standard nature, a comprehensive overview of LLP signatures at the LHC is beneficial to ensure that possible avenues of the discovery of new physics are not overlooked. Here we report on the joint work of a community of theorists and experimentalists with the ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb experiments—as well as those working on dedicated experiments such as MoEDAL, milliQan, MATHUSLA, CODEX-b, and FASER—to survey the current state of LLP searches at the LHC, and to chart a path for the development of LLP searches into the future, both in the upcoming Run 3 and at the high-luminosity LHC. The work is organized around the current and future potential capabilities of LHC experiments to generally discover new LLPs, and takes a signature-based approach to surveying classes of models that give rise to LLPs rather than emphasizing any particular theory motivation. We develop a set of simplified models; assess the coverage of current searches; document known, often unexpected backgrounds; explore the capabilities of proposed detector upgrades; provide recommendations for the presentation of search results; and look towards the newest frontiers, namely high-multiplicity ‘dark showers’, highlighting opportunities for expanding the LHC reach for these signals.

Two paradigms for the origin of electroweak superconductivity are a weakly coupled scalar condensate, and a strongly coupled fermion condensate. The former suffers from a finetuning problem unless there are cancelations to radiative corrections, while the latter presents potential discrepancies with precision electroweak physics. Here we present a framework for electroweak symmetry breaking which interpolates between these two paradigms, and mitigates their faults. As in Little Higgs theories, the Higgs is a pseudo-Nambu Goldstone boson, potentially composite. The cutoff sensitivity of the one loop top quark contribution to the effective potential is canceled by contributions from additional vector-like quarks, and the cutoff can naturally be higher than in the minimal Standard Model. Unlike the Little Higgs models, the cutoff sensitivity from one loop gauge contributions is not canceled. However, such gauge contributions are naturally small as long as the cutoff is below 6 TeV. Precision electroweak corrections are suppressed relative to those of Technicolor or generic Little Higgs theories. In some versions of the intermediate scenario, the Higgs mass is computable in terms of the masses of these additional fermions and the Nambu-Goldstone Boson decay constant. In addition to the Higgs, new scalar and pseudoscalar particles are typically present at the weak scale.

String theories suggest the existence of a plethora of axion-like fields with masses spread over a huge number of decades. Here we show that these ideas lend themselves to a model of quintessence with no super-Planckian field excursions and in which all dimensionless numbers are order unity. The scenario addresses the "why now" problem-i.e., why has accelerated expansion begun only recently-by suggesting that the onset of dark-energy domination occurs randomly with a slowly decreasing probability per unit logarithmic interval in cosmic time. The standard axion potential requires us to postulate a rapid decay of most of the axion fields that do no become dark energy.