Feasibility of detecting spin-0 dark matter mediators decaying into gauge bosons through invariant mass reconstruction

Abstract

Simplified Dark Matter (DM) models present a single dark matter particle that interacts weakly with Standard Model (SM) particles through a mediator particle. In this work, the potential of detecting an s-channel spin-0 DM mediator (Y₀) was explored by mass reconstruction of γ and Z boson-associated processes. The events for each process were generated using MadGraph5_aMC@NLO with Pythia8 for parton showering. Two RIVET analyses were then used for the Y₀ mass reconstruction: MC_DIPHOTON for diphoton pair productions and MC_ZZINC for Z boson pair productions. The process p p → γ Y₀, Y₀ → γ γ yielded the highest cross section for all three Y₀ masses. The Y₀ mass of 1000 GeV also produced the highest cross section for all processes. Well-defined peaks were observed at the expected masses of Y₀ for the processes p p → Z Y₀, Y₀ → γ γ and p p → γ Y₀, Y₀ → Z Z. Given the available analyses, these results indicate that processes in which the DM mediator decays into two identical bosons present a promising area for dark matter exploration.