Dark Matter Searches at the Large Hadron Collider

TL;DR

This paper reviews how the Large Hadron Collider searches for Dark Matter, focusing on WIMPs, their production mechanisms, detection challenges, and how collider results complement traditional detection methods.

Contribution

It provides an overview of Dark Matter search strategies at the LHC, emphasizing the role of WIMPs and the importance of collider experiments in the broader context of Dark Matter detection.

Findings

Collider can produce light mass Dark Matter undetectable by traditional methods

WIMPs pair production inferred from Missing Transverse Energy (MET)

Collider results translate to traditional Dark Matter interaction rates

Abstract

Dark Matter is a hypothetical particle proposed to explain the missing matter expected from the cosmological observation. The motivation of Dark Matter is overwhelming however as it is mainly deduced from its gravitational interaction, for it does little to pinpoint what Dark Matter really is. In WIMPs Miracle, weakly interactive massive particle being the Dark Matter candidate is correctly producing the current thermal relic density at weak scale, implying the possibility of producing and detecting it in Large Hadron Collider. Assuming WIMPs being the maverick particle within collider, it is expected to be pair produced in association with a Standard Model particle. The presence of the WIMPs pair is inferred from the Missing Transverse Energy (MET) which is the vector sum of the imbalance in the transverse momentum plane recoils a Standard Model Particle. The collider is able to produce light mass Dark Matter which the traditional detection fail to detect due to the small momentum transfer involved in the interaction; on the other hand, the traditional detection is robust in detecting a higher Dark matter masses but the collider is su ered from the parton distribution function suppression. Topologically the processes are similar to the scattering processes in the direct detection thus complementary to the traditional Dark Matter detection. The collider searches are strongly motivated as the results are usually translated to the annihilation and scattering rates at more traditional Dark Matter-oriented experiments, thus a concordance approach is adapted. An overview of Dark Matter searches at the Large Hadron Collider will be covered in this paper.