IFIC Seminar: A new LHC search for dark matter produced via heavy Higgs bosons using simplified models

by Victor Martin Lozano (IFIC (CSIC/UV))

Tuesday 4 Apr 2023, 12:00 → 13:00 Europe/Madrid

1001-Primera-1-1-1 - Paterna. Seminario (Universe)

Searches for dark matter produced via scalar resonances in final states consisting of Standard Model (SM) particles and missing transverse momentum are of high relevance at the LHC. Motivated by dark-matter portal models, most existing searches are optimized for unbalanced decay topologies for which the missing momentum recoils against the visible SM particles. In this work, we show that existing searches are also sensitive to a wider class of models, which we characterize by a recently presented simplified model framework. This framework was developed with the aim of taking into account production and decays of additional Higgs bosons decaying into final states containing beyond the SM (BSM) particles, as they often appear in BSM models. Given the fact that this framework is only mildly affected by the spin nature of the particles involved, expressing the results of experimental searches in terms of the proposed simplified model topologies will allow one to constrain wide classes of different BSM models. For this study, we investigate the feasibility of a new search for bottom-quark associated neutral Higgs production with a bbZ + pTmiss final state and perform a detailed collider analysis. Our projected results in the different simplified model topologies investigated here can be easily reinterpreted in a wide range of models of physics beyond the SM, which we explicitly demonstrate for the example of the Two-Higgs-Doublet model with an additional pseudoscalar Higgs boson.