Electroweak Dark Matter at Future Hadron Colliders

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the potential of future high-energy hadron colliders to detect electroweak dark matter particles, focusing on their mass reach through disappearing track and monojet searches, and compares collider sensitivity with indirect detection methods.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the extended mass reach for electroweak dark matter at the HE-LHC and 100-TeV colliders, highlighting the improved detection capabilities over current LHC projections.

Findings

Disappearing track searches can probe Higgsino-like DM up to 600 GeV at HE-LHC.

Disappearing track searches can probe wino-like DM up to 2.1 TeV at HE-LHC.

Monojet searches have a weaker reach, up to 490 GeV for Higgsino-like and 700 GeV for wino-like DM.

Abstract

In a large class of scenarios, dark matter (DM) particles that belong to a multiplet of the standard model (SM) weak interactions are challenging to probe in direct detection experiments due to loop-suppressed cross-sections. Direct production at colliders is thus crucial to look for such DM candidates, and under current estimates, future runs of the 14-TeV LHC are projected to probe masses of around 300 GeV for DM belonging to an SU(2) doublet (Higgsino-like), and 900 GeV for SU(2) triplet (wino-like). We examine how far this mass reach can be extended at the proposed 27-TeV high-energy upgrade of the LHC (HE-LHC), and compare the results to the case for a 100-TeV hadron collider. Following a detector setup similar to that of the ATLAS tracking system for the Run-2 LHC upgrade, with a new Insertable B-Layer (IBL), a disappearing charged track analysis at the HE-LHC can probe Higgsino-like (wino-like) DM mass of up to 600 GeV (2.1 TeV) at the 95% C.L. The monojet and missing transverse momentum search, on the otherhand, has a weaker reach of 490 GeV (700 GeV) at 95% C.L. for the Higgsino-like (wino-like) states. The mass range accessible in the collider searches can be complementary to the indirect detection probes using gamma rays from dwarf-spheroidal galaxies.