Impact of the 125 GeV Higgs boson on the singlet fermion dark matter searches at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper examines how the 125 GeV Higgs boson influences singlet fermion dark matter searches at the LHC, emphasizing its significant contribution when on-shell and its impact on experimental bounds.

Contribution

It introduces a model with two scalar mediators, including the 125 GeV Higgs, and analyzes its effects on dark matter production and collider search constraints.

Findings

The 125 GeV Higgs contribution can dominate in certain dark matter production scenarios.

Including the Higgs significantly affects LHC bounds on dark matter in hadronic and semileptonic channels.

The Higgs should be considered in future vector dark matter collider searches.

Abstract

The search for singlet fermion dark matter at high-energy colliders is commonly analyzed with a singlet scalar mediator, which however violates the standard model (SM) gauge invariance, renormalizability and unitarity. These problems can be cured by introducing a mixing between the singlet scalar $s$ and the SM Higgs boson $h$. Thus one has to consider two scalar mediators $h_1$ and $h_2$, where $h_1$ is identified as the discovered 125 GeV Higgs boson. As a specific example, we consider the dark matter (DM) search in the $t \bar{t} + E_{T}^{\text{miss}}$ channel. According to the masses of dark matter and two scalar mediators, we classify the process into four cases. By investigating the total cross sections and differential distributions, we find that the contribution of the 125~GeV Higgs boson $h_1$ cannot be neglected in all cases and can even dominate once $h_1$ is on-shell in dark matter production. Further, we study the impact of $h_1$ on the LHC bounds of dark matter searches in the hadronic and semileptonic channels with the integrated luminosity of $36~\text{fb}^{-1}$. Finally we make a brief comment that $h_1$ should be also considered in the vector DM search at high-energy colliders.