LEP Shines Light on Dark Matter

By P. Fox, R. Harnik, Joachim Kopp, Yuhsin Tsai. 2011

334 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Dark matter pair production at high energy colliders may leave observable signatures in the energy and momentum spectra of the objects recoiling against the dark matter. We use LEP data on mono-photon events with large missing energy to constrain the coupling of dark matter to electrons. Within a large class of models, our limits are complementary to and competitive with limits on dark matter annihilation and on WIMP-nucleon scattering from indirect and direct searches. Our limits, however, do not suer from systematic and astrophysical uncertainties associated with direct and indirect limits. For example, we are able to rule out light (. 10 GeV) thermal relic dark matter with universal couplings exclusively to charged leptons. In addition, for dark matter mass below about 80 GeV, LEP limits are stronger than Fermi constraints on annihilation into charged leptons in dwarf spheroidal galaxies. Within its kinematic reach, LEP also provides the strongest constraints on the spin-dependent direct detection cross section in models with universal couplings to both quarks and leptons. In such models the strongest limit is also set on spin independent scattering for dark matter masses below 4 GeV. Throughout our discussion, we consider both low energy eective theories of dark matter, as well as several motivated renormalizable scenarios involving light mediators.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48e3d83a69c8d689d1eae89eaf984f7be02c61e3

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Citations in the corpus

Neutralino dark matter at 14 TeV and 100 TeV (2014, background): “As dark matter will escape the detector unseen, there needs to be additional hard radiation of a standard model particle, which could be a quark or gluon [10, 11], photon [12, 13], W [14] or Z [15, 16], or even a higgs [17–19].”
Serendipity in dark photon searches (2018, methodology): “[52], and Iftah Galon for useful discussion.”
Constraining light dark matter with low-energy e+e− colliders (2013, methodology): “LEP mono-photon searches [5] are shaded in gray and limits from precision hidden photon searches are shown by the thin green line labeled “ε” (see text).”
Beyond effective field theory for dark matter searches at the LHC (2013, background): “Another ‘rule of thumb’ is that the limit on Λ at the peak scales as Γ−1/4 (this scaling is exact for an e+e− collider [6]).”
Benchmarks for dark matter searches at the LHC (2014, background): “This has motivated new and more model-independent strategies for DM searches at colliders, and led to a vast literature on the subject [1–88].”
New light species and the CMB (2013, background): “The possible interactions with the lowest dimensionality are electromagnetic dipole moments or four-fermion interactions between neutrinos and electrons, which are significantly constrained by star cooling [72] and the LEP collider [76].”
Refined bounds on MeV-scale thermal dark sectors from BBN and the CMB (2019, background): “Light dark matter particles and their potential mediators with the dark sector have been searched for at particle colliders [40–47], beam dump experiments [48–50], neutrino experiments [51–56], neutrino telescopes [57–59], as well as in direct [60–67] and indirect [68–70] dark matter detection exper”