Heavy stable charged tracks as signatures of non-thermal dark matter at the LHC: a study in some non-supersymmetric scenarios

Abstract

We consider two theoretical scenarios, each including a ℤ₂-odd sector and leading to an elementary dark matter candidate. The first one is a variant of the Type-III seesaw model where one lepton triplet is ℤ₂-odd, together with a heavy sterile neutrino. It leads to a fermionic dark matter, together with the charged component of the triplet being a quasi-stable particle which decays only via a higher-dimensional operator suppressed by a high scale. The second model consists of an inert scalar doublet together with a ℤ₂-odd right-handed Majorana neutrino dark matter. A tiny Yukawa coupling delays the decay of the charged component of the inert doublet into the dark matter candidate, making the former long-lived on the scale of collider detectors. The parameter space of each model has been constrained by big-bang nucleosynthesis constraints, and also by estimating the contribution to the relic density through freeze-out of the long-lived charged particle as well the freeze-in production of the dark matter candidate. We consider two kinds of signals at the Large Hadron Collider for each case. For the first kind of models, namely two charged tracks and single track +E_T and for the second kind, the characteristic signals are opposite as well as same-sign charged track pairs. We perform a detailed analysis using event selection criteria consistent with the current experimental programmes. It is found that the scenario with a lepton triplet can be probed upto 960 (1190) GeV with an integrated luminosity of 300 (3000) fb⁻¹, while the corresponding numbers for the inert doublet scenario are 630 (800) GeV. Furthermore, the second kind of signal mentioned in each case allows us to differentiate different dark matter scenarios from each other.