Can WIMP Dark Matter overcome the Nightmare Scenario?

TL;DR

This paper explores whether WIMP dark matter can provide evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model in a scenario where new physics is inaccessible at current colliders, by analyzing its relic abundance, detection prospects, and collider production.

Contribution

It introduces a Higgs-coupled WIMP dark matter model as a potential solution to the nightmare scenario and examines its phenomenological implications.

Findings

WIMP dark matter can account for the observed relic abundance.

Direct detection experiments can potentially observe the proposed WIMP.

LHC production of WIMPs offers a complementary discovery channel.

Abstract

Even if new physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) indeed exists, the energy scale of new physics might be beyond the reach at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the LHC could find only the Higgs boson but nothing else. This is the so-called "nightmare scenario". On the other hand, the existence of the dark matter has been established from various observations. One of the promising candidates for thermal relic dark matter is a stable and electric charge-neutral Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) with the mass below the TeV scale. In the nightmare scenario, we introduce a WIMP dark matter singlet under the SM gauge group, which only couples to the Higgs doublet at the lowest order, and investigate a possibility that such WIMP dark matter can be a clue to overcome the nightmare scenario via various phenomenological tests such as the dark matter relic abundance, the direct detection experiments for the dark matter particle, and the production of the dark matter particle at the LHC.