Signatures of Top Flavored Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper investigates the experimental signatures of top flavored dark matter, showing its compatibility with current bounds, potential exclusion by future experiments, and distinctive collider signatures including displaced vertices.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of top flavored dark matter's detection prospects at direct detection experiments and the LHC, including novel signatures like displaced vertices for certain mass splittings.

Findings

Top FDM is consistent with current direct detection bounds for masses above 200 GeV.

Next-generation direct detection experiments can exclude the entire parameter space of top FDM.

Displaced vertices are a distinctive collider signature when flavor partners are nearly degenerate in mass.

Abstract

We study the experimental signatures of top flavored dark matter (top FDM) in direct detection searches and at the LHC. We show that for a dark matter mass above 200 GeV, top FDM can be consistent with current bounds from direct detection experiments and relic abundance constraints. We also show that next generation direct detection experiments will be able to exclude the entire perturbative parameter region for top FDM. For regions of parameter space where the flavor partners of top FDM are not readily produced, the LHC signatures of top FDM are similar to those of other models previously studied in the literature. For the case when the flavor partners are produced at the LHC, we study their impact on a search based on transverse mass variables and find that they diminish the signal significance. However, when the DM flavor partners are split in mass by less than 120-130 GeV, the LHC phenomenology becomes very distinctive through the appearance of displaced vertices. We also propose a strategy by which all parameters of the underlying model can be experimentally determined when the flavor partners can be observed.