A dark force for baryons
  We suggest the existence of a fundamental connection between baryonic and
dark matter. This is motivated by both the stability of these two types of
matter as well as the observed similarity of their present-day densities. A
unified genesis of baryonic and dark matter is natural in models in which the
baryon number is promoted to a spontaneously broken local gauge symmetry. This
is illustrated in a specific class of SUSY models using the Affleck-Dine
mechanism. The dark matter candidate in these scenarios is charged under the
baryon gauge symmetry and must have a mass around the GeV scale to give the
correct present-day abundance. We discuss constraints from B-factories, LEP,
mono-jet searches at the Tevatron, and dark matter direct detection
experiments. A baryonic dark force is shown to be consistent with all data for
mediators as light as the GeV scale.
