Missing Energy Signatures of Dark Matter at the LHC

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

495 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use ATLAS and CMS searches in the mono-jet + missing energy and mono-photon + missing energy final state to set limits on the couplings of dark matter to quarks and gluons. Working in an effective field theory framework we compare several existing mono-jet analyses and find that searches with high p_T cuts are more sensitive to dark matter. We constrain the suppression scale of the effective dark matter-Standard Model interactions, and convert these limits into bounds on the cross sections relevant to direct and indirect detection. We find that, for certain types of operators, in particular spin-independent dark matter-gluon couplings and spin-dependent dark matter-quark couplings, LHC constraints from the mono-jet channel are competitive with, or superior to, limits from direct searches up to dark matter masses of order 1 TeV. Comparing to indirect searches, we exclude, at 90% C.L., dark matter annihilating to quarks with the annihilation cross section of a thermal relic for masses below ~ 15-70 GeV, depending on the Lorentz structure of the effective couplings. Mono-photon limits are somewhat weaker than mono-jet bounds, but still provide an important cross check in the case of a discovery in mono-jets. We also discuss the possibility that dark matter--Standard Model interactions at LHC energies cannot be described by effective operators, in which case we find that constraints can become either significantly stronger, or considerably weaker, depending on the mass and width of the intermediate particle. We also discuss the special case of dark matter coupling to the Higgs boson, and we show that searches for invisible Higgs decays would provide superior sensitivity, particularly for a light Higgs mass and light dark matter.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/816839baff2541d3b8c0a2cd863593ccb9d838b3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Recommendations on presenting LHC searches for missing transverse energy signals using simplified s-channel models of dark matter (2016, background): “For earlier articles discussing aspects of simplified s-channel DM models, see also [10–21].”
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].”
Search for dark matter, extra dimensions, and unparticles in monojet events in proton–proton collisions at s=8 TeV (2015, methodology): “However, not all widths may be physically realizable for the DM couplings that are considered [62].”
Composite scalar dark matter (2012, background): “In some cases [44] these searches can provide comparable bounds to DM direct detection experiments, in particular for light fermionic DM (with mDM .”
Dark matter direct-detection experiments (2015, background): “[394][395][396]) or by considering minimal simplified darkmatter models (e.”
Constraining light dark matter with low-energy e+e− colliders (2013, unknown): “[1–17].”
Characterising dark matter searches at colliders and direct detection experiments: vector mediators (2014, unknown): “As has been discussed in the literature [11, 12, 32], the mediator width Γmed plays an important role in mono-jet searches.”
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].”
On the validity of the effective field theory for dark matter searches at the LHC part III: analysis for the t-channel (2013, methodology): “J C A P 0 6 ( 2 0 1 4 ) 0 6 0 In order to avoid the overwhelming model-dependence introduced by the plethora of DM models discussed in the literature, DM searches at the LHC have made use of the Effective Field Theory (EFT) [18–28].”
Dark Matter through the Higgs portal (2019, result): “There, and in contrast to astroparticle experiments, one can search at the same time for the DM particles by looking for instance at invisible Higgs decays [98, 169–180] and other missing transverse energy signatures [93, 94], as well as for the possible companions of these particles, the new fermio”
Search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum in pp collisions at root s=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector (2015, background): “[40,42– 46].”