Search for Leptophilic Dark Matter at the LHeC

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of the LHeC collider to detect leptophilic dark matter particles up to 350 GeV, using missing energy signatures, and discusses its advantages over other detection methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel search strategy for leptophilic dark matter at the LHeC, demonstrating its capability to discover weak-scale dark matter consistent with relic density constraints.

Findings

LHeC can detect dark matter up to 350 GeV.

Search strategy effectively suppresses Standard Model background.

Implications for lepton flavor violation are discussed.

Abstract

The Large Hadron electron Collider (LHeC) has been designed to push the field of deep inelastic scattering to the high energy and intensity frontier using an intense electron beam with a proton beam from the High Luminosity-Large Hadron Collider. However, LHeC is also a great laboratory for new physics. In this work, we propose a search for dark matter that couples with leptons. This may yield $ej$+ missing energy and $\mu j$ + missing energy signals that can be potentially observed through simple missing-energy cuts that suppress the Standard Model background. Considering direct dark matter detection and LHC constraints, we show that LHeC can indeed discover a weak scale dark matter fermion for masses up to 350 GeV, which reproduces the correct relic density, and has interesting implications for lepton flavor violation.