Beyond effective field theory for dark matter searches at the LHC

By O. Buchmueller, M. Dolan, C. McCabe. 2013

261 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A bstractWe study the validity of effective field theory (EFT) interpretations of monojet searches for dark matter at the LHC for vector and axial-vector interactions. We show that the EFT approach is valid when the mediator has mass mmed greater than 2.5 TeV. We find that the current limits on the contact interaction scale Λ in the EFT apply to theories that are perturbative for dark matter mass mDM < 800 GeV. However, for all values of mDM in these theories, the mediator width is larger than the mass, so that a particle-like interpretation of the mediator is doubtful. Furthermore, consistency with the thermal relic density occurs only for 170 ≲ mDM ≲ 510 GeV. For lighter mediator masses, the EFT limit either under-estimates the true limit (because the process is resonantly enhanced) or over-estimates it (because the missing energy distribution is too soft). We give some ‘rules of thumb’ that can be used to estimate the limit on Λ (to an accuracy of ~ 50 %) for any mDM and mmed from knowledge of the EFT limit. We also compare the relative sensitivities of monojet and dark matter direct detection searches finding that both dominate in different regions of the mDM - mmed plane. Comparing only the EFT limit with direct searches is misleading and can lead to incorrect conclusions about the relative sensitivity of the two search approaches.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b0abbfc9728ecf8008b1da4f567438b2eddc3553

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Citations in the corpus

Extended gamma-ray emission from Coy Dark Matter (2014, background): “We also note that at such large values of gDM, the mediator width is larger than its mass, making the particle interpretation of the mediator questionable [73].”
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].”
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, unknown): “This assumption is not always correct at the LHC, where the momentum transfer reaches the TeV scale [43–46].”
Benchmarks for dark matter searches at the LHC (2014, background): “At first sight, this approach appears to be fully model-independent, although in practice it has limited validity [24, 26, 49, 51, 57, 64].”
Characterising dark matter searches at colliders and direct detection experiments: vector mediators (2014, unknown): “previous paper [12], the limits from the EFT framework for collider searches apply only to a limited class of theories in which the mediator mass is very heavy and the couplings are very large.”
On the validity of the effective field theory for dark matter searches at the LHC part III: analysis for the t-channel (2013, background): “[7, 21, 29–35]), especially in the perspective of analysing the data from the future LHC run at (13-14) TeV.”
Constraining Dark Sectors at Colliders: Beyond the Effective Theory Approach (2014, background): “43 [8,61], assuming democratic couplings to all quark flavors.”
Search for dark matter, extra dimensions, and unparticles in monojet events in proton–proton collisions at s=8 TeV (2015, background): “In addition, the range of values for the couplings being probed within the effective field theory may be unrealistically large [65].”