Searches for dark matter and dark energy produced in association with a jet with the ATLAS detector

Abstract

The astrophysical and cosmological evidence of dark matter and dark energy provides some of the most compelling clues to the nature of physics beyond the Standard Model. If it interacts weakly with the Standard Model, dark matter can be produced directly at the LHC. Dark energy may exist in the form of light scalar particles that could contribute to the accelerating expansion of the observable universe. The following shows the results of the search for dark matter and the first collider search for dark energy, using events with large missing transverse momentum produced in association with jets using 36.1 fb$^{-1}$ of $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV $pp$ collision ATLAS data. This search sets the most stringent constraints on the suppression scale of disformal couplings of dark energy to Standard Model matter in the context of an effective field theory of dark energy following the Horndeski theory framework.