Abstract
Higgs-portal effective field theories are widely used as benchmarks in order to interpret collider and astroparticle searches for dark matter (DM) particles. To assess the validity of these effective models, it is important to confront them to concrete realizations that are complete in the ultraviolet regime. In this paper, we compare effective Higgs-portal models with scalar, fermionic and vector DM with a series of increasingly complex realistic models, taking into account all existing constraints from collider and astroparticle physics. These complete realizations include the inert doublet with scalar DM, the singlet-doublet model for fermionic DM and models based on spontaneously broken dark SU(2) and SU(3) gauge symmetries for vector boson DM. We also discuss the simpler scenarios in which a new scalar singlet field that mixes with the standard Higgs field is introduced with minimal couplings to isosinglet spin-0, frac{1}{2} and 1 DM states. We show that in large regions of the parameter space of these models, the effective Higgs-portal approach provides a consistent limit and thus, can be safely adopted, in particular for the interpretation of searches for invisible Higgs boson decays at the LHC. The phenomenological implications of assuming or not that the DM states generate the correct cosmological relic density are also discussed.
Highlights
We discuss the simpler scenarios in which a new scalar singlet field that mixes with the standard Higgs field is introduced with minimal couplings to isosinglet spin-0, 1 2 and
The most economical among them are the Higgs-portal models consisting in the extension of the Standard Model (SM) with a single new particle, the dark matter (DM) state, which interacts in pairs only with the Higgs sector of the theory which is assumed to be minimal and involves only the unique Higgs boson observed at the LHC [4,5]; see Ref. [6] for a recent review
In order to properly address the bounds from perturbative unitarity in V V → V V scattering through Higgs boson exchange, we introduce an explicit mechanism for the generation of the DM mass based on the spontaneous breaking of a dark gauge symmetry.In this subsection, we consider the simplest case, namely the dark U(1) scenario in which the DM content is minimal; the discussion of more complicated scenarios will be postponed to the section
Summary
The effective field theory approach in the Higgs-portal scenario for dark matter has been formulated and extensively used for spin-0, spin- 21 as well as for spin-1 DM particles. The DM states that couple only to the Higgs boson feature spin independent (SI) interactions with detectors such as XENON1T which currently provides the strongest direct detection experimental constraints. These are expressed as upper limits on the elastic scattering cross section over nucleons, typically protons, as a function of the DM mass. For even smaller DM masses, MX 5 GeV, the sensitivity of direct detection experiments is limited by the energy threshold of the detectors and the
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