UC Irvine

The particle nature of dark matter remains an open question to the physics community, despite a monumental effort to determine its properties. These efforts have resulted in a wealth of experimental knowledge and a rich model space of possible explanations. Dark matter phenomenology stands at the intersection of these efforts, and this thesis contains a series of works that attempt to constrain or construct models based on the empirical data. The first of these works details the insights the initial results of the LHC had on isospin violating dark matter in the context of effective operators. The next work deals with the possible effective operators between Dirac dark matter and photon lines at indirect detection experiments. The third is about a model of light scalar mediators used to explain a possible signal at the CDMS experiment. The fourth and final work concerns itself with a particular annihilation topology generated by dark matter going to on-shell mediators.