Next-to-minimal dark matter at the LHC

Abstract

We examine the collider signatures of a WIMP dark matter scenario comprising a singlet fermion and an SU(2) n-plet fermion, with a focus on n = 3 and n = 5. The singlet and n-plet masses are of the order of the electroweak scale. The n-plet contains new charged particles which will be copiously pair-produced at the LHC. Small mixing angles and near-degenerate masses, both of which feature naturally in these models, give rise to long-lived particles and their characteristic collider signatures. In particular, the n = 5 model can be constrained by displaced lepton searches independently of the mixing angle, generically ruling out 5-plet masses below about 280 GeV. For small mixing angles, we show that there is a parameter range for which the model reproduces the observed thermal relic density but is severely constrained by disappearing track searches in both the n = 3 and the n = 5 cases. The n = 3 model is further constrained by soft di-lepton searches irrespective of whether any of the new particles are long-lived.