Events featuring a photon and missing transverse momentum were analyzed.
To test one of the many dark sector models proposed in the literature, CMS physicists set about looking for events where the Higgs boson decays into one photon and one massless "dark photon", which would be the particle equivalent to the photon in electromagnetism, but in the dark sector. Instead, their production can be inferred from the "missing transverse momentum", the imbalance in the sum of particle momenta in the plane perpendicular to the proton beams, which should add up to zero if all particles are detected. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the dark sector is that it has very weak or no interaction with the ordinary matter of the detector, meaning the particles just pass through the experiment without leaving a signal.
In particle detectors like the Compact Muon Solenoid, dark sector particles produced in the proton collisions are not directly observed. If there is indeed such an interaction between dark matter and the Higgs boson, and if the mass of the Higgs boson is larger than that of some of those dark sector particles, the former can decay into the latter with some probability. In addition, being the latest particle of the standard model to be discovered, some of the properties of the Higgs boson are still only known within large uncertainties. Among the standard model particles, the Higgs boson has a unique combination of properties that could allow it to interact with dark sector particles without introducing other changes to the model. How would dark sector particles be produced at the large hadron collider? The key could be the Higgs boson. Within the dark sector family, however, there whould be new types of particles and interactions. Most of these new particles would have no direct interaction with the known particles and would therefore collectively act as dark matter, invisible to objects made of "ordinary matter" like humans. One class of dark matter models actually introduces a whole new family of particles called the dark sector particles. Some of such theoretical models predict that dark matter particles can be produced in the high-energy proton collisions at the large hadron collider, enabling detailed studies of its properties.
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There is a vast number of proposals explaining the identity of dark matter and how to accommodate it in an extension of the standard model.
Besides its existence, physicists know very little about dark matter, due to its seemingly extremely feeble interaction with ordinary matter. On the other hand, many astronomical measurements have measured that dark matter accounts for more than 80% of the mass in the observable universe. The standard model of particle physics describes the behavior of elementary particles with incredible accuracy but provides no explanation or possible particle that can constitute dark matter. The study of dark matter is one of the primary research topics at the CMS experiment.
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