Searching for the signal of dark matter and photon associated production at the LHC beyond leading order

TL;DR

This paper analyzes dark matter and photon production at the LHC, incorporating QCD NLO corrections to improve cross section predictions and experimental constraints, and assesses detection prospects.

Contribution

It provides the first QCD NLO calculations for dark matter-photon associated production and applies these to refine experimental bounds and detection strategies.

Findings

QCD NLO corrections reduce scale dependence of cross sections.

K factors increase with dark matter mass, up to 1.3.

Improved constraints on new physics scale from CMS data.

Abstract

We study the signal of dark matter and photon associated production induced by the vector and axial-vector operators at the LHC, including the QCD next-to-leading order (NLO) effects. We find that the QCD NLO corrections reduce the dependence of the total cross sections on the factorization and renormalization scales, and the $K$ factors increase with the increasing of the dark matter mass, which can be as large as about 1.3 for both the vector and axial-vector operators. Using our QCD NLO results, we improve the constraints on the new physics scale from the results of the recent CMS experiment. Moreover, we show the Monte Carlo simulation results for detecting the $\gamma+\Slash{E}_{T}$ signal at the QCD NLO level, and present the integrated luminosity needed for a $5\sigma$ discovery at the 14 TeV LHC . If the signal is not observed, the lower limit on the new physics scale can be set.