Particlebites Reports on Monojet Dark Matter Searches at the LHC

Particlebites logoIf you’re a long-time astrobites reader with interests that extend to the fascinating and vibrant field of particle physics, you’ll love the work being published at our sister site particlebites.  Like astrobites, particlebites authors are graduate students that cover the latest research in their field, particle physics, by posting concise and engaging summaries of newly published research and preprints.   Below is an excerpt from a post by particlebites author Julia Gonski.

Now is a good time to be a dark matter experiment. The astrophysical evidence for its existence is almost undeniable (such as gravitational lensing and the cosmic microwave background; see the “Further Reading” list if you want to know more.) Physicists are pulling out all the stops trying to pin DM down by any means necessary.

However, by its very nature, it is extremely difficult to detect; dark matter is called dark because it has no known electromagnetic interactions, meaning it doesn’t couple to the photon. It does, however, have very noticeable gravitational effects, and some theories allow for the possibility of weak interactions as well.

While there are a wide variety of experiments searching for dark matter right now, the scope of this post will be a bit narrower, focusing on a common technique used to look for dark matter at the LHC, known as ‘monojets’. We rely on the fact that a quark-quark interaction could actually produce dark matter particle candidates, known as weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), through some unknown process. Most likely, the dark matter would then pass through the detector without any interactions, kind of like neutrinos. But if it doesn’t have any interactions, how do we expect to actually see anything? Figure 1 shows the overall Feynman diagram of the interaction; I’ll explain how and why each of these particles comes into the picture.

 

View the full article on particlebites here.

 

Figure 1: Feynman diagram for dark matter production process.

Figure 1: Feynman diagram for dark matter production process

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This post was written by authors at our sister site particlebites. Read more great articles about particle physics authored by graduate students in the field at http://www.particlebites.com/

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