LHC Implications of the WIMP Miracle and Grand Unification

TL;DR

This paper explores the implications of the WIMP miracle and grand unification for dark matter and predicts new colored particles at the TeV scale that could be detected at the LHC through various signatures, including R-hadrons and Higgs production channels.

Contribution

It identifies robust phenomenological trends of TeV-scale matter content under grand unification assumptions and analyzes their collider signatures, including stable colored states and new Higgs production mechanisms.

Findings

Potential discovery of R-hadrons at early LHC runs.

New Higgs production channel could be observable before Standard Model predictions.

Flavor/CP constraints allow for a range of decay behaviors of new colored particles.

Abstract

With the assumptions that dark matter consists of an electroweak triplet and that the gauge couplings unify at a high scale, we identify robust phenomenological trends of possible matter contents at the TeV scale. In particular, we expect new colored states within the LHC reach that can have Yukawa couplings lambda to quarks and the Higgs. We investigate the collider signatures that are characteristic of all such models by adopting the model with the simplest matter content as a benchmark. The lambda couplings are constrained by flavor/CP physics. In the largest portion of the allowed parameter space the new colored particles are stable on collider time scales, hence appearing as R-hadrons, for which there is discovery potential at the early LHC (sqrt{s}=7 TeV, 1 fb^(-1)). Flavor/CP constraints nevertheless do allow a sizable range of lambda where the new colored particles decay promptly, providing a new Higgs production channel with a cross-section governed by the strong interaction. Studying the case of h to WW, we show that it is possible for the Higgs production from this new channel to be discovered before that from the Standard Model at the LHC.