• Open Access

How to prove that a ET excess at the LHC is not due to dark matter

Doojin Kim and Konstantin T. Matchev
Phys. Rev. D 98, 055018 – Published 14 September 2018

Abstract

If the LHC is able to produce dark matter particles, they would appear at the end of cascade decay chains, manifesting themselves as missing transverse energy. However, such “dark matter candidates” may themselves decay invisibly. We propose to test for this possibility by studying the effect of particle widths on the observable invariant mass distributions of the visible particles seen in the detector. We consider the simplest nontrivial case of a two-step two-body cascade decay and derive analytically the shapes of the invariant mass distributions, for generic values of the widths of the new particles. We demonstrate that the resulting distortion in the shape of the invariant mass distribution can be significant enough to measure the width of the dark matter “candidate,” ruling it out as the source of the cosmological dark matter.

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  • Received 2 February 2018
  • Revised 14 May 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.98.055018

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Particles & Fields

Authors & Affiliations

Doojin Kim1 and Konstantin T. Matchev2

  • 1Theoretical Physics Department, CERN, CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland
  • 2Physics Department, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611, USA

Article Text

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Issue

Vol. 98, Iss. 5 — 1 September 2018

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