Implications of LHC searches for Higgs-portal dark matter

Abdelhak Djouadi,Oleg Lebedev,Yann Mambrini,Jérémie Quevillon

doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2012.01.062

Abstract

The search for the a Standard Model Higgs boson at the LHC is reaching a critical stage as the possible mass range for the particle has become extremely narrow and some signal at a mass of about 125 GeV is starting to emerge. We study the implications of these LHC Higgs searches for Higgs-portal models of dark matter in a rather model independent way. Their impact on the cosmological relic density and on the direct detection rates are studied in the context of generic scalar, vector and fermionic thermal dark matter particles. Assuming a sufficiently small invisible Higgs decay branching ratio, we find that current data, in particular from the XENON experiment, essentially exclude fermionic dark matter as well as light, i.e. with masses below ≈60 GeV, scalar and vector dark matter particles. Possible observation of these particles at the planned upgrade of the XENON experiment as well in collider searches is discussed.

Highlights

The ATLAS and CMS collaborations have recently reported on the search of the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson with 5 fb−1 data [1]
The first aim of our study is to derive constraints on the various dark matter (DM) particles from the WMAP satellite [18] and from the current direct detection experiment XENON100 [19], and to make predictions for future upgrades of the latter experiment, assuming that the Higgs boson has a mass mh = 125 GeV and is approximately SM–like such that its invisible decay branching ratio is smaller than 10%; we have checked that increasing this fraction to 20% does not change our results significantly
We have analyzed the implications of the recent LHC Higgs results for generic Higgs-portal models of scalar, vector and fermionic dark matter particles

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The ATLAS and CMS collaborations have recently reported on the search of the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson with 5 fb−1 data [1]. The first aim of our study is to derive constraints on the various DM particles from the WMAP satellite [18] and from the current direct detection experiment XENON100 [19], and to make predictions for future upgrades of the latter experiment, assuming that the Higgs boson has a mass mh = 125 GeV and is approximately SM–like such that its invisible decay branching ratio is smaller than 10%; we have checked that increasing this fraction to 20% does not change our results significantly. We find no parameter regions satisfying the constraints, most notably the XENON100 bound, and this scenario is ruled out for λhff /Λ >∼ 10−3 In particular in the main production channel, the gluon fusion mechanism gg → h σ SI (pb)

XENON1T

Findings

CONCLUSION