Illuminating dark photons with high-energy colliders

By D. Curtin, R. Essig, Stefania Gori, J. Shelton. 2014

343 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A bstractHigh-energy colliders offer a unique sensitivity to dark photons, the mediators of a broken dark U(1) gauge theory that kinetically mixes with the Standard Model (SM) hypercharge. Dark photons can be detected in the exotic decay of the 125 GeV Higgs boson, h→ZZD →4ℓ, and in Drell-Yan events, pp→ZD → ℓℓ. If the dark U(1) is broken by a hidden-sector Higgs mechanism, then mixing between the dark and SM Higgs bosons also allows the exotic decay h → ZDZD → 4ℓ. We show that the 14 TeV LHC and a 100 TeV proton-proton collider provide powerful probes of both exotic Higgs decay channels. In the case of kinetic mixing alone, direct Drell-Yan production offers the best sensitivity to ZD , and can probe ϵ ≳ 9 × 10−4 (4 × 10−4) at the HL-LHC (100 TeV pp collider). The exotic Higgs decay h → ZZD offers slightly weaker sensitivity, but both measurements are necessary to distinguish the kinetically mixed dark photon from other scenarios. If Higgs mixing is also present, then the decay h → ZDZD can allow sensitivity to the ZD for ϵ ≳ 10−9 − 10−6 (10−10 − 10−7) for the mass range 2mμ<mZD<mh/2$$ 2{m}_{\mu }<{m_Z}_{{}_D}<{m}_h/2 $$ by searching for displaced dark photon decays. We also compare the ZD sensitivity at pp colliders to the indirect, but model-independent, sensitivity of global fits to electroweak precision observables. We perform a global electroweak fit of the dark photon model, substantially updating previous work in the literature. Electroweak precision measurements at LEP, Tevatron, and the LHC exclude ϵ as low as 3 × 10−2. Sensitivity can be improved by up to a factor of ∼ 2 with HL-LHC data, and an additional factor of ∼ 4 with ILC/GigaZ data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8a1b3ddc59395ccbd1262f69c046eb5601be0b21

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Citations in the corpus

Expression of interest for the CODEX-b detector (2019, methodology): “[18–20]).”
Direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter with semiconductor targets (2015, background): “Among these, we only show the strongest constraints, which are a BaBar search for e+e− → γ + invisible [49, 51, 52] as well as electroweak precision tests (EWPT) [77, 78]; however, to guide the eye, we also show the “favored” 2σ-region for which the A′ can explain the discrepancy between the measure”
The Dark Photon (2020, methodology): “The physics reach of ATLAS/CMS like experiments have been computed for √ s = 14 TeV and 3 ab−1 and √ s = 100 TeV, 3 ab−1 (Curtin et al., 2015).”
SIMP spectroscopy (2015, methodology): “These are: Belle-II visible [65] (solid red) and invisible [29] (solid purple); SHiP [66] (solid orange); Drell-Yan at LHC14 [30] (dashed blue) and 100 TeV pp collider [30] (solid blue); ILC monophoton search [67] (solid green), reinterpretation of contact operators at the ILC [68, 69] (solid violet”
Physics at a 100 TeV pp collider: Higgs and EW symmetry breaking studies (2016, background): “This was demonstrated for dark photons in [308] and for displaced decays in the context of Neutral Naturalness by [309], but applies to any theory which produces ultra-rare exotic Higgs decays with conspicuous final states.”
Dark Matter's secret liaisons: phenomenology of a dark U(1) sector with bound states (2016, background): “[79, 81] for recent works), we determine the hadronic decay width from measurements of e+e− → hadrons.”
Searching for long-lived particles beyond the Standard Model at the Large Hadron Collider (2019, background): “This naturally yields high-multiplicity events featuring particles with a hierarchy of lifetimes [32, 230, 456].”
Discovering uncolored naturalness in exotic Higgs decays (2015, methodology): “The HAHM Madgraph model [76] is used to simulate the kinematics of Higgs bosons produced via gluon-fusion and vector-boson-fusion, with subsequent decay into two scalars s, which each decay dominantly into two b-quarks or τ -leptons.”
Higgs Physics at the HL-LHC and HE-LHC (2019, methodology): “This was analysed in [836, 545] and can lead to ✏ as small as few⇥10 9 to be probed in Higgs exotic decays at the HL-LHC.”