Pair-production of the charged IDM scalars at high energy CLIC

TL;DR

This study evaluates CLIC's potential to discover charged inert doublet model scalars at high energies, demonstrating the collider's capability to detect particles up to about 1 TeV mass through detailed simulations.

Contribution

The paper provides the first detailed simulation-based analysis of charged IDM scalar pair-production at CLIC, incorporating beam-induced backgrounds and extending sensitivity estimates.

Findings

Heavy charged IDM scalars can be discovered up to ~1 TeV mass at CLIC.

Full detector simulation with GEANT4 was used for high-mass benchmark scenarios.

Modified DELPHES framework accounts for beam-induced backgrounds in sensitivity estimates.

Abstract

The Inert Doublet Model (IDM) is a simple extension of the Standard Model, introducing an additional Higgs doublet that brings in four new scalar particles. The lightest of the IDM scalars is stable and is a good candidate for a dark matter particle. The potential of discovering the IDM scalars in the experiment at the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC), an e$^{+}$e$^{-}$ collider proposed as the next generation infrastructure at CERN, has been tested for two high-energy running stages, at 1.5 TeV and 3 TeV centre-of-mass energy. The CLIC sensitivity to pair-production of the charged IDM scalars was studied using the full detector simulation with GEANT4 for selected high-mass IDM benchmark scenarios and the semi-leptonic final state. To extrapolate full simulation results to a wider range of IDM benchmark scenarios, the CLIC detector model defined in the DELPHES fast simulation framework was modified to take into account the $\gamma\gamma \rightarrow$ had. beam-induced background. Results of the study indicate that heavy charged IDM scalars can be discovered at CLIC for most of the considered benchmark scenarios, up to masses of the order of 1 TeV.