Contact interactions and top-philic scalar dark matter

TL;DR

This paper explores how adding a contact interaction term affects the behavior and detection prospects of a top-philic scalar dark matter candidate, highlighting the importance of combined collider and cosmological constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a dimension-five contact interaction into the top-philic scalar dark matter model and analyzes its impact on relic density and detection, emphasizing the complementarity of constraints.

Findings

Contact interactions significantly alter relic density predictions.

Collider phenomenology remains unchanged by contact interactions.

Enhanced prospects for direct and indirect detection due to contact terms.

Abstract

We investigate the phenomenology of a scalar top-philic dark matter candidate when adding a dimension-five contact interaction term, as motivated by possible underlying extensions of the Standard Model such as composite Higgs models. We show that the presence of contact interactions can have a major impact on the dark matter relic density as well as on its direct and indirect detection prospects, while the collider phenomenology of the model is unaffected. This underlines the complementarity of collider and cosmological constraints on dark matter models.