Maverick dark matter at colliders

TL;DR

This paper investigates collider signatures of a hypothetical 'maverick' dark matter particle produced at the LHC, focusing on distinguishing its signals from standard-model backgrounds through jet energy and multiplicity analysis.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of a maverick dark matter particle with contact interactions and analyzes its collider signatures, highlighting distinctive jet and missing energy features.

Findings

Maverick dark matter leads to higher jet energies and multiplicities.

Collider signals show excess of events with large missing energy and high jet transverse momentum.

Existing data can constrain or potentially discover maverick dark matter.

Abstract

Assuming that dark matter is a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) species X produced in the early Universe as a cold thermal relic, we study the collider signal of pp or ppbar -> XXbar + jets and its distinguishability from standard-model background processes associated with jets and missing energy. We assume that the WIMP is the sole particle related to dark matter within reach of the LHC--a "maverick" particle--and that it couples to quarks through a higher dimensional contact interaction. We simulate the WIMP final-state signal XXbar + jet and dominant standard-model (SM) background processes and find that the dark-matter production process results in higher energies for the colored final state partons than do the standard-model background processes, resulting in more QCD radiation and a higher jet multiplicity. As a consequence, the detectable signature of maverick dark matter is an excess over standard-model expectations of events consisting of large missing transverse energy, together with large leading jet transverse momentum and scalar sum of the transverse momenta of the jets. Existing Tevatron data and forthcoming LHC data can constrain (or discover!) maverick dark matter.