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Search for dark matter at colliders

Nature Physics volume 13, pages 217–223 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

Among the numerous proposals to explain the nature of dark matter, there is the weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) scenario, which is based on a simple assumption that dark matter was in thermal equilibrium in the early hot Universe, and its particles have mass and interactions not too different from the massive particles in the standard model. In this Progress Article we overview the inference of WIMP production at high-energy colliders, with a particular focus on searches at the Large Hadron Collider.

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Figure 1: Schematic illustration of DM interactions and their corresponding experimental detection techniques, with time flowing from left to right.
Figure 2: Schematic illustration of missing transverse momentum from DM production inferred from the recoil of visible particles, in a general purpose LHC detector.
Figure 3: A typical production and decay chain involving SUSY particles.
Figure 4: Schematic illustration of the basic SM–DM interactions at colliders, with time flowing from left to right.
Figure 5: Sketch of the constraints on a simplified model of WIMP DM where a particle with axial vector couplings of 1.0 and 0.25 to DM and SM respectively is exchanged.
Figure 6: Sketch of the comparison between constraints set on spin-dependent WIMP–proton scattering cross-section for DM searches at colliders (red line) and at direct detection experiment probing different regions in WIMP mass (green lines).

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Boveia, M. Danninger, A. De Roeck, T. J. Khoo, G. Landsberg, and C. Young for valuable comments on this manuscript. Work by C.D. is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No 679305) and from the Swedish Research Council. The work of L.-T.W. was supported in part by the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago through grant NSF PHY-1125897 and an endowment from the Kavli Foundation and its founder F. Kavli.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. High Energy Physics Group, Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College, Prince Consort Road, London SW7 2AZ, UK

    Oliver Buchmueller

  2. Fysiska Institutionen, Lunds Universitet, Box 118, 221 00 Lund, Sweden

    Caterina Doglioni

  3. Enrico Fermi Institute and Department of Physics and Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago, 5640 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA

    Lian-Tao Wang

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Buchmueller, O., Doglioni, C. & Wang, LT. Search for dark matter at colliders. Nature Phys 13, 217–223 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys4054

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