Naturalino dark matter from top partners

Naturalino is my name for dark matter which also makes the extended standard model "natural" - a play on the common dark matter candidate, "neutralino". And a top partner is a new particle that is somehow associated with the top quark - for example, the stop squarks of the MSSM.

A few days ago I began to contemplate the possibility of naturalinos as top partners, ever since I realized that the top or its partners are the common element to otherwise dissimilar schemes for explaining the mass of the Higgs.

Today on the arxiv we have a paper on dark matter models containing "a singlet dark matter particle with cubic renormalizable couplings between standard model particles and 'partner' particles with the same gauge quantum numbers as the standard model particle.. We focus on the case of dark matter interactions with colored particles."

And today we also have a second paper aiming to obtain naturalness from a scale-invariant extension of the standard model where the Higgs is coupled to a dark matter multiplet.

Neither is quite what I had in mind, but if you jam them together and rearrange the parts...

I will also report a recent paper adding new neutrinos to Lambda CDM, producing the "nu-LCDM".

Conformally coupled Higgs inflation

This is another possibility which should interest minimalists: In a theory that contains gravity and the Higgs, a "non-minimal coupling" between the two fields, usually designated by the coefficient "xi", is possible. By default, xi is normally set equal to zero. In theories of Higgs inflation, xi is normally set to a large value of several thousand. But for a special, small but nonzero, value of xi, the Higgs-curvature coupling becomes conformal. Is it possible, perhaps with the right UV physics, to get successful Higgs inflation from conformal coupling to gravity? The main interest of this question lies in the possibility that the underlying fundamental theory has a conformal symmetry broken by quantum corrections, perhaps as contemplated by Meissner and Nicolai, and Bars, Steinhardt, and Turok. In this discussion thread, I have collected some technical resources on Higgs inflation which may help to clarify the issue.