Abstract
A dark sector—a new non-Abelian gauge group Higgsed or confined near the GeV scale—can be spectacularly probed in low-energy collisions. A low-mass dark sector can explain the annual modulation signal reported by DAMA/LIBRA and the PAMELA, ATIC, and INTEGRAL observations by generating small mass splittings and new interactions for weak-scale dark matter. Some of these observations may be the first signs of a low-mass dark sector that collider searches can definitively confirm. Production and decay of -mass dark states is mediated by a Higgsed Abelian gauge boson that mixes kinetically with hypercharge. Existing data from BABAR, BELLE, CLEO-c, and KLOE may contain thousands of striking dark-sector events with a high multiplicity of leptons that reconstruct mass resonances and possibly displaced vertices. We discuss the production and decay phenomenology of Higgsed and confined dark sectors and propose collider search strategies. We also use the DAMA/LIBRA signal to estimate the production cross sections and decay lifetimes for dark-sector states.
12 More- Received 6 April 2009
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.80.015003
©2009 American Physical Society