Constraints on Dark Matter from Colliders

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that collider experiments like the Tevatron and LHC can set strong, sometimes superior, constraints on light dark matter models, especially when direct detection methods are less effective.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of collider bounds on dark matter models with effective operators, highlighting their complementarity and potential superiority over direct detection.

Findings

Colliders can outperform direct detection in constraining spin-dependent interactions.

LHC bounds are stronger for dark matter coupling mainly to gluons.

Tevatron and LHC can surpass existing direct detection limits over much of the parameter space.

Abstract

We show that colliders can impose strong constraints on models of dark matter, in particular when the dark matter is light. We analyze models where the dark matter is a fermion or scalar interacting with quarks and/or gluons through an effective theory containing higher dimensional operators which represent heavier states that have been integrated out of the effective field theory. We determine bounds from existing Tevatron searches for monojets as well as expected LHC reaches for a discovery. We find that colliders can provide information which is complementary or in some cases even superior to experiments searching for direct detection of dark matter through its scattering with nuclei. In particular, both the Tevatron and the LHC can outperform spin dependent searches by an order of magnitude or better over much of parameter space, and if the dark matter couples mainly to gluons, the LHC can place bounds superior to any spin independent search.