HEP ‘Lab Tour’

Anirudh Krovi
March 15, 2019
• What will I do?
• Try to give a big picture view of what some of my work looks like: what a typical research effort in my
area of study may look like structurally.

• What will I not do?

• Give detailed technical explanations.

• Provide equations – there’s grad school for both!

How do we look for Dark Matter?

• Direct Detection: Experiments such as Xenon1T, etc.

• Indirect Detection: Results from Fermi-LAT, etc.
• Collider Physics: LHC, for instance. This will be my main focus here.
• We will consider a model where we have fermion DM and a massive, spin-one mediator which we
call Z’.

• Small Z’ mass and heavy DM mass combinations are a little difficult to study compared to other
possible combinations of Z’ mass and DM mass.

• Enter bound states:

• Akin to a hydrogen atom - it is a bound state of electron and proton which interact via coulomb
interaction. Here DM particles interact through a force mediated by a Z’.

• We can then study the decay modes of the bound state and derive constraints.
Some months of work and learning Physics later, we get the following results:

• Details are for another day: The

punchline is that we can now probe
simultaneously Z’ masses as low as
20GeV and DM masses as high as 1000
GeV.

• Notice the complementarity between

the phase space probed by bound
states and Mono-X Dark Matter
Searches.
Okay, but what about direct and indirect detection?

• Here, they provide ‘consistency’ conditions.

• Lots of interplay between different

constraints. Need to be careful and
take everything into account.

• For example, had to introduce a mass

splitting between DM states to be
consistent with Direct Detection
constraints.
Thank you, and I look forward to seeing you again this Fall!