Seminars

An exploration of strongly interacting dark sectors in ATLAS and beyond

by Dr. Sukanya Sinha (University of Manchester)

Europe/London
R61 CR3 (RAL)

R61 CR3 (RAL)

Description

There are many theoretical models that postulate the presence of dark matter (DM) particles. Dedicated searches for these particles are a pillar of the LHC physics programme. Yet, to date, no direct evidence of these particles have been found at the LHC. The lack of discovery thus far indicates that if DM is a particle with mass ranges accessible at colliders, it’s experimental signature might be subtle. Several recent phenomenological studies have raised the possibility of accessing a strongly interacting dark sector through new collider-event topologies. If dark hadrons exist, their evolution and hadronization procedure are currently little constrained. They could decay promptly and result in QCD-like jet structures (dark jets), even though the original decaying particles are dark sector ones; they could behave as semi-visible jets (SVJ); or they could behave as completely detector-stable hadrons. Advancements in particle reconstruction and detector identification methods have enabled first investigations of such models at the LHC, with initial constraints on certain signatures available from ATLAS and CMS, but this is only the beginning. I will provide an overview of the strong dark sector searches in ATLAS and the new potential final state signatures originating from this sector, covering published or soon to be published papers.