Inelastic dark matter at the LHC lifetime frontier: ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, CODEX-b, FASER, and MATHUSLA

Abstract

Visible signals from the decays of light long-lived hidden sector particles have been extensively searched for at beam dump, fixed-target, and collider experiments. If such hidden sectors couple to the standard model through mediators heavier than ∼10 GeV, their production at low-energy accelerators is kinematically suppressed, leaving open significant pockets of viable parameter space. We investigate this scenario in models of inelastic dark matter, which give rise to visible signals at various existing and proposed LHC experiments, such as ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, CODEX-b, FASER, and MATHUSLA. These experiments can leverage the large center of mass energy of the LHC to produce GeV-scale dark matter from the decays of dark photons in the cosmologically motivated mass range of ∼1-100 GeV. We also provide a detailed calculation of the radiative dark matter-nucleon/electron elastic scattering cross section, which is relevant for estimating rates at direct detection experiments.