Unblinding the Dark Matter Blind Spots

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the challenges of detecting dark matter in MSSM blind spots and evaluates how future collider and detection experiments can overcome these obstacles to uncover such elusive regions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of dark matter blind spots in MSSM, exploring collider, direct, and indirect detection strategies to improve search coverage.

Findings

Future SD direct detection may rescue SI blind spots.

Gamma-ray searches may not reach necessary sensitivity.

LHC searches will significantly extend discovery regions.

Abstract

The dark matter (DM) blind spots in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) refer to the parameter regions where the couplings of the DM particles to the $Z$-boson or the Higgs boson are almost zero, leading to vanishingly small signals for the DM direct detections. In this paper, we carry out comprehensive analyses for the DM searches under the blind-spot scenarios in MSSM. Guided by the requirement of acceptable DM relic abundance, we explore the complementary coverage for the theory parameters at the LHC, the projection for the future underground DM direct searches, and the indirect searches from the relic DM annihilation into photons and neutrinos. We find that (i) the spin-independent (SI) blind spots may be rescued by the spin-dependent (SD) direct detection in the future underground experiments, and possibly by the indirect DM detections from IceCube and SuperK neutrino experiments; (ii) the detection of gamma rays from Fermi-LAT may not reach the desirable sensitivity for searching for the DM blind-spot regions; (iii) the SUSY searches at the LHC will substantially extend the discovery region for the blind-spot parameters. The dark matter blind spots thus may be unblinded with the collective efforts in future DM searches.