Search for Dark Matter Decaying to Two Displaced Muons Produced in Proton-Proton Collisions at 13 TeV with the CMS Detector, and for Dark Photons Produced in Electron-Positron Fixed-Target Collisions at 500 MeV with the PADME Detector

Published May 15, 2020 | Version v1

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Resource type: Thesis
Thesis: Two novel searches for dark matter using particle accelerators are presented. The first is a search for inelastically-coupled dark matter with the CMS detector at CERN, relying on 137 inverse femtobarns of proton-proton collision data collected at 13 TeV center-of mass energy between 2016 and 2018. The search strategy exploits the striking signature expected of inelastic dark matter: a pair of displaced, soft, and narrow muons collimated with missing transverse momentum and recoiled off an initial-state radiation jet. This is the first search for inelastic dark matter at a hadron collider. The second experiment is PADME, a small-scale detector to search for dark photons located in Frascati, Italy. PADME seeks to detect the production of dark photons in positron-electron collisions with a stationary diamond target and a 500 MeV positron beam. The missing-mass technique employed in the experiment relies on constraining all four-momenta in the system except for the dark photon and looking for a bump in the resulting invariant mass distribution corresponding to the dark photon's mass. The projected sensitivity for both experiments is compared in the context of highlighting the need for a comprehensive experimental search program for dark matter. Both analyses expect first public results by the end of 2020., Submitted: 2020
Languages: English