Constraining Gluonic Contact Interaction of a Neutrino-philic Dark Fermion at Hadron Colliders and Direct Detection Experiments

Abstract

Weakly interacting fermions with the Standard Model particles are promising candidates for the dark matter. In this paper, we study signatures of the gluonic interactions of a dark fermion and a neutrino at hadron colliders and direct detection experiments. The lowest order interactions are described by contact operators in dimension 7. At hadron colliders, the mono-jet production is the most sensitive channel. And these operators can also induce both spin-independent and spin-dependent absorption of the dark fermion at nuclear targets. We show that for a nearly massless dark fermion, the energy scales are constrained to be higher than 500 GeV and 1.2 TeV by the current LHC and HE-LHC searches, respectively. Furthermore, we also find that almost all the parameter space accessible by the spin-independent absorption has been excluded by the current LHC constraints. In contrast, for spin-dependent absorption at light nuclear targets there is still some parameter space which cannot be reached by current and upcoming LHC searches.

34 pages, 7 captioned figures; 1 figure and 3 tables in the Appendix; matches the published version