Probing Dark Matter with Disappearing Tracks at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper reinterprets LHC disappearing track searches to probe various dark matter models, demonstrating that this signature can explore parameter spaces beyond traditional missing energy searches, and provides recasting tools for future studies.

Contribution

It extends disappearing track analysis to multiple dark matter models beyond supersymmetry, offering new constraints and publicly available recasting code.

Findings

Disappearing tracks can probe large dark matter parameter spaces.

Constraints surpass those from prompt missing energy searches.

Recasting code is publicly available for future research.

Abstract

Models where dark matter is a part of an electroweak multiplet feature charged particles with macroscopic lifetimes due to the charged-neutral mass split of the order of pion mass. At the Large Hadron Collider, the ATLAS and CMS experiments will identify these charged particles as disappearing tracks, since they decay into a massive invisible dark matter candidate and a very soft charged Standard-Model particle which fails to pass the reconstruction requirements. While ATLAS and CMS have focused on the supersymmetric versions of these scenarios, we have performed here the reinterpretation of the latest ATLAS disappearing track search for a suite of dark matter multiplets with different spins and electroweak quantum numbers. More concretely, we consider the cases of the inert Two Higgs Doublet model (i2HDM), of Minimal Fermion Dark Matter (MFDM) and of Vector Triplet Dark Matter (VTDM). Our procedure is validated by using the same wino and higgsino benchmark models employed by the ATLAS collaboration. We have found that with the disappearing track signature one can probe a vast portion of the parameter space, well beyond the reach of prompt missing energy searches (notably mono-jets). We provide tables with the upper-limits on the cross-section upper limits, and efficiencies in the lifetime - dark matter mass plane for all the models under consideration. Moreover we make the recasting code employed here publicly available, as part of the LLP Recasting Repository.