Bertone, G., Bozorgnia, N., Kim, J. S., Liem, S., McCabe, C., Otten, S., et al. (2018). Identifying WIMP dark matter from particle and astroparticle data. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 03(3), 026–42pp.
Abstract: One of the most promising strategies to identify the nature of dark matter consists in the search for new particles at accelerators and with so-called direct detection experiments. Working within the framework of simplified models, and making use of machine learning tools to speed up statistical inference, we address the question of what we can learn about dark matter from a detection at the LHC and a forthcoming direct detection experiment. We show that with a combination of accelerator and direct detection data, it is possible to identify newly discovered particles as dark matter, by reconstructing their relic density assuming they are weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) thermally produced in the early Universe, and demonstrating that it is consistent with the measured dark matter abundance. An inconsistency between these two quantities would instead point either towards additional physics in the dark sector, or towards a non-standard cosmology, with a thermal history substantially different from that of the standard cosmological model.
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Caron, S., Ruiz de Austri, R., & Zhang, Z. Y. (2023). Mixture-of-Theories training: can we find new physics and anomalies better by mixing physical theories? J. High Energy Phys., 03(3), 004–37pp.
Abstract: Model-independent search strategies have been increasingly proposed in recent years because on the one hand there has been no clear signal for new physics and on the other hand there is a lack of a highly probable and parameter-free extension of the standard model. For these reasons, there is no simple search target so far. In this work, we try to take a new direction and ask the question: bearing in mind that we have a large number of new physics theories that go beyond the Standard Model and may contain a grain of truth, can we improve our search strategy for unknown signals by using them “in combination”? In particular, we show that a signal hypothesis based on a large, intermingled set of many different theoretical signal models can be a superior approach to find an unknown BSM signal. Applied to a recent data challenge, we show that “mixture-of-theories training” outperforms strategies that optimize signal regions with a single BSM model as well as most unsupervised strategies. Applications of this work include anomaly detection and the definition of signal regions in the search for signals of new physics.
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Arina, C., Di Mauro, M., Fornengo, N., Heisig, J., Jueid, A., & Ruiz de Austri, R. (2024). CosmiXs: cosmic messenger spectra for indirect dark matter searches. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 03(3), 035–41pp.
Abstract: The energy spectra of particles produced from dark matter (DM) annihilation or decay are one of the fundamental ingredients to calculate the predicted fluxes of cosmic rays and radiation searched for in indirect DM detection. We revisit the calculation of the source spectra for annihilating and decaying DM using the VINCIA shower algorithm in PYTHIA to include QED and QCD final state radiation and diagrams for the EW corrections with massive bosons, not present in the default PYTHIA shower model. We take into account the spin information of the particles during the entire EW shower and the off -shell contributions from massive gauge bosons. Furthermore, we perform a dedicated tuning of the VINCIA and PYTHIA parameters to LEP data on the production of pions, photons, and hyperons at the Z resonance and discuss the underlying uncertainties. To enable the use of our results in DM studies, we provide the tabulated source spectra for the most relevant cosmic messenger particles, namely antiprotons, positrons, gamma rays and the three neutrino flavors, for all the fermionic and bosonic channels and DM masses between 5 GeV and 100 TeV, on github.
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Boubekeur, L., Choi, K. Y., Ruiz de Austri, R., & Vives, O. (2010). The degenerate gravitino scenario. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 04(4), 005–26pp.
Abstract: In this work, we explore the “degenerate gravitino” scenario where the mass difference between the gravitino and the lightest MSSM particle is much smaller than the gravitino mass itself. In this case, the energy released in the decay of the next to lightest sypersymmetric particle (NLSP) is reduced. Consequently the cosmological and astrophysical constraints on the gravitino abundance, and hence on the reheating temperature, become softer than in the usual case. On the other hand, such small mass splittings generically imply a much longer lifetime for the NLSP. We find that, in the constrained MSSM (CMSSM), for neutralino LSP or NLSP, reheating temperatures compatible with thermal leptogenesis are reached for small splittings of order 10(-2) GeV. While for stau NLSP, temperatures of T-RH similar or equal to 4 x 10(9) GeV can be obtained even for splittings of order of tens of GeVs. This “degenerate gravitino” scenario offers a possible way out to the gravitino problem for thermal leptogenesis in supersymmetric theories.
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Cabrera, M. E., Casas, J. A., Mitsou, V. A., Ruiz de Austri, R., & Terron, J. (2012). Histogram comparison tools for the search of new physics at LHC. Application to the CMSSM. J. High Energy Phys., 04(4), 133–27pp.
Abstract: We propose a rigorous and effective way to compare experimental and theoretical histograms, incorporating the different sources of statistical and systematic uncertainties. This is a useful tool to extract as much information as possible from the comparison between experimental data with theoretical simulations, optimizing the chances of identifying New Physics at the LHC. We illustrate this by showing how a search in the CMSSM parameter space, using Bayesian techniques, can effectively find the correct values of the CMSSM parameters by comparing histograms of events with multijets + missing transverse momentum displayed in the effective-mass variable. The procedure is in fact very efficient to identify the true supersymmetric model, in the case supersymmetry is really there and accessible to the LHC.
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