Abstract
Dark matter that is electrically neutral but couples to the electromagnetic current through higher-dimensional operators constitutes an interesting class of models. We investigate this class of models at the Large Hadron Collider, focusing on the anapole moment operator in an effective field theory (EFT) framework, and utilizing the vector boson fusion (VBF) topology. Assuming proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV, we present the VBF anapole dark matter (ADM) cross sections and kinematic distributions as functions of the free parameters of the EFT, the cutoff scale $\Lambda$ and the ADM mass $m_{\chi}$. We find that the distinctive VBF topology of two forward jets and large dijet pseudorapidity gap is effective at reducing SM backgrounds, leading to a $5\sigma $ discovery reach for all kinematically allowed ADM masses with $\Lambda \le 1.65$ (1.15) TeV, assuming an integrated luminosity of 3000 (100) fb$^{-1}$.
Highlights
Determining the identity of dark matter (DM) is one of the most active areas of research in particle physics
We note a study of the appropriate trigger for the proposed vector boson fusion (VBF) anapole dark matter (ADM) search under the HL-Large Hadron Collider (LHC) conditions is outside the scope of this work, we assume a 3% systematic uncertainty on trigger efficiency following Ref. [18,24]
We have explored the possibility of using VBF processes as probes to discover DM that couples to the Standard Model (SM) through higher electromagnetic moments
Summary
Determining the identity of dark matter (DM) is one of the most active areas of research in particle physics. One interesting class of DM models is where the DM particle is itself electrically neutral, but couples to the photon through higher multipole interactions. This scenario has been considered by many authors ([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]) in a variety of UV settings: technicolor [3,7], composite dark sectors [8], supersymmetry [13], simplified leptophilic models [14,15], and simplified light dark sectors [16]. The anapole dark matter (ADM) operator can be written as
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