Abstract: Dark-matter particles that annihilate or decay can undergo complex sequences of processes, including strong and electromagnetic radiation, hadronisation, and hadron de-cays, before particles that are stable on astrophysical time scales are produced. Antiprotons produced in this way may leave footprints in experiments such as AMS-02. Several groups have reported an excess of events in the antiproton flux in the rigidity range of 10-20 GV. However, the theoretical modeling of baryon production is not straightforward and relies in part on phenomenological models in Monte Carlo event generators. In this work, we assess the impact of QCD uncertainties on the spectra of antiprotons from dark-matter annihila-tion. As a proof-of-principle, we show that for a two-parameter model that depends only on the thermally-averaged annihilation cross section ((o -v)) and the dark-matter mass (Mx), QCD uncertainties can affect the best-fit mass by up to ti 14% (with large uncertainties for large DM masses), depending on the choice of Mx and the annihilation channel (bb over bar or W+W-), and (o -v) by up to ti 10%. For comparison, changes to the underlying diffusion parameters are found to be within 1%-5%, and the results are also quite resilient to the choice of cosmic-ray propagation model. These findings indicate that QCD uncertainties need to be included in future DM analyses. To facilitate full-fledged analyses, we provide the spectra in tabulated form including QCD uncertainties and code snippets to perform mass interpolations and quick DM fits. The code can be found in this GitHub [1] repository.

Abstract: A final state consisting of one charged lepton, at least one jet, and little missing transverse energy can be a very promising signature of new physics at the LHC across a wide range of models. However, it has received only limited attention so far. In this work we discuss the potential sensitivity of this channel to various new physics scenarios. To demonstrate our point, we consider its application to lepton parton distribution functions (PDFs) at the LHC in the context of supersymmetry. These lepton PDFs can lead to resonant squark production (similar to leptoquarks) via lepton number violating couplings present in R-parity violating supersymmetry (RPV-SUSY). Unlike leptoquarks, in RPV-SUSY there are many possible decay modes leading to a wide range of signatures. We propose two generic search regions: (a) a single first or second generation charged lepton, exactly 1 jet and low missing transverse energy, and (b) a single first or second generation charged lepton, at least 3 jets, and low missing transverse energy. We demonstrate that together these cover a large range of RPV-SUSY signatures, and have the potential to perform better than existing low-energy bounds, while being general enough to extend to a wide range of possible models hitherto not explored at the LHC.