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Dark matter production with the CMS detector at CERN
High energy particle colliders, like the LHC, are one of three ways proposed to detect dark matter. Dark matter is theorized to be a natural candidate for the lightest supersymmetric particle and is proposed to be a decay product in an event where SUSY sparticles are pair produced and decay into standard model quarks, which are detected in the collider and a neutralino that escapes detection (proposed DM). The other two methods are direct detection, in which we expect dark matter scattering off a nuclei, and indirect detection, in which dark matter annihilates and remnants of this annihilation are studied. Previous collider searches have been done for dark matter produced in association with a single photon or jet. My work looks specifically for events where dark matter particles are produced in association with at least two jets and leave behind a signature of large missing transverse energy (ET) in the detector. Because of the large amount of missing ET, we can utilize the razor variables MR and R2, developed initially for SuperSymmetry searches . My aim is to improve upper limits on the DM production cross section and translate these into the cross section of DM-nucleon interaction to compare with results from direct detection experiments. I also hope to analyze the results for various different theoretical models. |