Search for leptophilic dark matter at the LHeC

Abstract

The Large Hadron electron Collider (LHeC) has been designed to push the field of deep inelastic scattering to the high energy and intensity frontier using an intense electron beam with a proton beam from the High Luminosity–Large Hadron Collider. However, LHeC is also a great laboratory for new physics. In this work, we propose a search for dark matter that couples with leptons. This may yield and signals that can be potentially observed through simple missing-energy cuts that suppress the Standard Model background. Considering direct dark matter detection and LHC constraints, we show that LHeC offers a complementary probe for a weak scale dark matter fermion for masses up to 350 GeV, which reproduces the correct relic density, and has interesting implications for lepton flavor violation.