Status of the Inert Doublet Model and the Role of multileptons at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the inert doublet model's viability in light of recent LHC Higgs searches and dark matter constraints, identifying conditions under which a heavy Higgs is still possible and exploring detection prospects at the LHC.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of IDM scenarios considering current experimental constraints and assesses the potential for future multilepton plus missing energy signals at the LHC.

Findings

Heavy Higgs in IDM is allowed if dark matter contribution is partial.

Combined experimental constraints exclude IDM with 160-600 GeV Higgs when all data are considered.

Future LHC runs could detect IDM signals in four-lepton plus missing energy channel.

Abstract

A possible feature of the inert doublet model (IDM) is to provide a dark matter candidate together with an alteration of both direct and indirect collider constraints that allow for a heavy Higgs boson. We study the IDM in light of recent results from Higgs searches at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in combination with dark matter direct detection limits from the XENON experiment. We ask under what conditions the IDM can still accommodate a heavy Higgs boson. We find that IDM scenarios with a Higgs boson in the mass range 160-600 GeV are ruled out only when all experimental constraints are combined. For models explaining only a fraction of the dark matter the limits are weakened, and IDMs with a heavy Higgs are allowed. We discuss the prospects for future detection of such IDM scenarios in the four-lepton plus missing energy channel at the LHC. This signal can show up in the first year of running at \sqrt{s} = 14 TeV, and we present detector-level studies for a few benchmark models.