# Probing Leptophilic Dark Sectors with Hadronic Processes

## TL;DR

This paper investigates leptophilic dark matter models with vector mediators, highlighting how radiative effects induce quark interactions and experimental signatures, leading to new bounds from collider, direct, and indirect detection methods.

## Contribution

It demonstrates that radiative effects in leptophilic dark sectors generate significant quark interactions and experimental signals, often surpassing tree-level contributions, and provides comprehensive experimental bounds.

## Key findings

- Radiative effects induce quark interactions in leptophilic models.
- Current experiments constrain these models effectively.
- Radiative contributions often dominate over tree-level processes.

## Abstract

We study vector portal dark matter models where the mediator couples only to leptons. In spite of the lack of tree-level couplings to colored states, radiative effects generate interactions with quark fields that could give rise to a signal in current and future experiments. We identify such experimental signatures: scattering of nuclei in dark matter direct detection; resonant production of lepton-antilepton pairs at the Large Hadron Collider; and hadronic final states in dark matter indirect searches. Furthermore, radiative effects also generate an irreducible mass mixing between the vector mediator and the $Z$ boson, severely bounded by ElectroWeak Precision Tests. We use current experimental results to put bounds on this class of models, accounting for both radiatively induced and tree-level processes. Remarkably, the former often overwhelm the latter.