Exploring a Dark Sector Through the Higgs Portal at a Lepton Collider

Abstract

We investigate the prospects for detecting a hidden sector at an $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ collider. The hidden sector is assumed to be composed of invisible particles that carry no charges under the Standard Model gauge interactions, and whose primary interactions with ordinary matter are through the Higgs portal. We consider both the cases when the decays of an on-shell Higgs into a pair of hidden sector particles are kinematically allowed, and the case when such decays are kinematically forbidden. We find that at collider energies below a TeV, the most sensitive channel involves production of an on-shell or off-shell Higgs in association with a Z boson, and the subsequent decay of the Higgs into invisible hidden sector states. Focusing on this channel, we find that with order a thousand inverse fb of data at 250 GeV, the decay branching fraction of an on-shell Higgs to invisible hidden sector states can be constrained to lie below half a percent. The corresponding limits on Higgs portal dark matter will be stronger than the bounds from current and upcoming direct detection experiments in much of parameter space. With the same amount of data at 500 GeV, assuming order one couplings, decays of an off-shell Higgs to hidden sector states with a total mass up to about 200 GeV can also be probed. Both the on-shell and off-shell cases represent a significant improvement in sensitivity when compared to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

7 pages, 6 figures, minor revisions, with added references, new version to appear in Physics Letters B

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• Probing Baryogenesis with Displaced Vertices at the LHC
• A Hidden Dark Matter Sector, Dark Radiation, and the CMB
• Z-portal dark matter
• Cosmological Constraints on Decoupled Dark Photons and Dark Higgs
• A Global View of the Off-Shell Higgs Portal
• Dark matter shifts away from direct detection
• Higgs portal dark matter in non-thermal cosmologies
• Towards a No-Lose Theorem for Naturalness
• Search for Higgs portal DM at the ILC
• Probing the Type-II Seesaw Mechanism through the Production of Higgs Bosons at a Lepton Collider
• GAMBIT and its Application in the Search for Physics Beyond the Standard Model
• Invisible Higgs from forward muons at a muon collider
• Collider Searches for Dark Matter through the Higgs Lens
• Probing the fermionic Higgs portal at lepton colliders
• Variations on the Vev Flip-Flop: Instantaneous Freeze-out and Decaying Dark Matter
• Spectroscopy of Scalar Mediators to Dark Matter at the LHC and at 100 TeV
• Higgs-portal Scalar Dark Matter: Scattering Cross Section and Observable Limits
• The Higgs Portal Above Threshold
• Towards resolving strongly-interacting dark sectors at colliders
• Dark matter amnesia in out-of-equilibrium scenarios
• Searching for pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson dark matter production in association with top quarks
• Probing Higgs portals with matrix-element based kinematic discriminants in $ZZ\to 4\ell$ production
• A Case for Future Lepton Colliders