Abstract
We study for the first time the collider reach on the derivative Higgs portal, the leading effective interaction that couples a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson (pNGB) scalar Dark Matter to the Standard Model. We focus on Dark Matter pair production through an off-shell Higgs boson, which is analyzed in the vector boson fusion channel. A variety of future high-energy lepton colliders as well as hadron colliders are considered, including CLIC, a muon collider, the High-Luminosity and High-Energy versions of the LHC, and FCC-hh. Implications on the parameter space of pNGB Dark Matter are discussed. In addition, we give improved and extended results for the collider reach on the marginal Higgs portal, under the assumption that the new scalars escape the detector, as motivated by a variety of beyond the Standard Model scenarios.
Highlights
The hypothesis that Dark Matter (DM) is composed of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) whose abundance is determined by thermal freeze-out has been a leading paradigm for decades
We focus on Higgs production via vector boson fusion (VBF), see Fig. 1, because it is expected to provide the best sensitivity both at high-energy lepton colliders and at hadron colliders
An important result is that hadron colliders have stronger sensitivity to the derivative Higgs portal than to the marginal Higgs portal, because the former produces harder kinematic distributions that allow a more effective background suppression
Summary
The hypothesis that Dark Matter (DM) is composed of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) whose abundance is determined by thermal freeze-out has been a leading paradigm for decades. We focus on VBF production, which at lepton colliders provides the leading sensitivity for s 1 TeV, and at hadron colliders was found to be superior to monojet and tth in the previous study of Ref. Note that if the integrated luminosity turns out to be L rather than the assumed L, the reach on f /cd1/2 scales as (L /L)1/8 and the reach on λ scales as (L/L )1/4 (this neglects systematic uncertainties, on which we will comment at the end of Sec. 3) Before concluding this Introduction, we briefly summarize the reach for mφ < mh/2, in which case on-shell invisible Higgs decays are the main search avenue. Table 3: 95% CL exclusion limits on the coefficients of the derivative and marginal Higgs portal operators, obtained from on-shell invisible Higgs decays, assuming mφ mh/2.
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