Neutralinos in Vector Boson Fusion at High Energy Colliders

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the potential of high-energy colliders to detect neutralinos, a dark matter candidate, via vector boson fusion, highlighting the sensitivity differences between the LHC and future 100 TeV colliders.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of neutralino detection prospects in vector boson fusion at current and future colliders, focusing on pure winos and higgsinos.

Findings

LHC sensitivity to winos up to 240 GeV with 1% uncertainty

Future 100 TeV collider can detect winos up to 1.1 TeV

Detection sensitivity for higgsinos significantly improves at 100 TeV

Abstract

Discovering dark matter at high energy colliders continues to be a compelling and well-motivated possibility. Weakly interacting massive particles are a particularly interesting class in which the dark matter particles interact with the standard model weak gauge bosons. Neutralinos are a prototypical example that arise in supersymmetric models. In the limit where all other superpartners are decoupled, it is known that for relic density motivated masses, the rates for neutralinos are too small to be discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but that they may be large enough for a 100 TeV collider to observe. In this work we perform a careful study in the vector boson fusion channel for pure winos and pure higgsinos. We find that given a systematic uncertainty of 1% (5%), with 3000 fb$^{-1}$, the LHC is sensitive to winos of 240 GeV (125 GeV) and higgsinos of 125 GeV (55 GeV). A future 100 TeV collider would be sensitive to winos of 1.1 TeV (750 GeV) and higgsinos of 530 GeV (180 GeV) with a 1% (5%) uncertainty, also with 3000 fb$^{-1}$.