On the coverage of neutralino dark matter in coannihilations at the upgraded LHC

TL;DR

This paper assesses the upgraded LHC's ability to detect neutralino dark matter in supersymmetric models through coannihilation channels, finding significant exclusion potential for certain particles but limited sensitivity for stau coannihilation.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of HE-LHC coverage for neutralino dark matter in various coannihilation scenarios, highlighting the experimental reach and limitations.

Findings

Neutralino mass can be excluded up to 2.6 TeV in gluino coannihilation.

Exclusion limits of 1.7 TeV for stop coannihilation.

Limited sensitivity for stau coannihilation due to low cross section.

Abstract

In the supersymmetric models, the coannihilation of the neutralino DM with a lighter supersymmetric particle provides a feasible way to accommodate the observed cosmological DM relic density. Such a mechanism predicts a compressed spectrum of the neutralino DM and its coannihilating partner, which results in the soft final states and makes the searches for sparticles challenging at colliders. On the other hand, the abundance of the freeze-out neutralino DM usually increases as the DM mass becomes heavier. This implies an upper bound on the mass of the neutralino DM. Given these observations, we explore the HE-LHC coverage of the neutralino DM for the coannihilations. By analyzing the events of the multijet with the missing transverse energy ($E^{miss}_T$), the monojet, the soft lepton pair plus $E^{miss}_T$, and the monojet plus a hadronic tau, we find that the neutralino DM mass can be excluded up to 2.6, 1.7 and 0.8 TeV in the gluino, stop and wino coannihilations at the $2\sigma$ level, respectively. However, there is still no sensitivity of the neutralino DM in stau coannihilation at the HE-LHC, due to the small cross section of the direct stau pair production and the low tagging efficiency of soft tau from the stau decay.