May 25, 2023 - Dark Higgs Bosons at Colliders

What if the Higgs mechanism confirmed at the LHC wasn’t the only Higgs mechanism? What if a similar mechanism exists to give mass to dark matter particles or to other gauge bosons mediating its interactions (e.g. dark photons)? Such models predict the existence of a so-called dark Higgs boson that can be searched for at different collider experiments, including CMS and Belle II.

A team of experimental and theoretical physicists from KIT and DESY have summarised the status of the phenomenology and of experimental searches for both light and heavy dark Higgs bosons in more than 50 pages in a review that appeared as a preprint this week: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16169. Prof. Ferber (Institute of Experimental Particle Physics, KIT) and Prof. Kahlhoefer (Institute for Theoretical Particle Physics, KIT), two of the authors of this review, have already been working together in the past years to develop different search strategies for so called dark sectors. “Bringing together cosmology, astrophysics, direct searches for dark matter in underground labs, and direct and indirect searches at the LHC and at high intensity colliders was exciting and fun work. I am really happy that we were able to give a complete overview of the very active field that is perfectly summarized in the last figure of our review.” says Ferber. The summary figure he refers to can be seen next to this text.