Pseudo-Dirac Dark Matter Leaves a Trace

• Main Authors: De Simone, Andrea (Contributor), Sanz, Veronica (Author), Sato, Hiromitsu Phil (Author)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Physical Society, 2011-01-28T18:16:16Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 Pseudo-Dirac dark matter is a viable type of dark matter which originates from a new Dirac fermion whose two Weyl states get slightly split in mass by a small Majorana term. The decay of the heavier to the lighter state naturally occurs over a detectable length scale. Thus, whenever pseudo-Dirac dark matter is produced in a collider, it leaves a clear trace: a visible displaced vertex in association with missing energy. Moreover, pseudo-Dirac dark matter behaves Dirac-like for relic abundance and Majorana-like in direct detection experiments. We provide a general effective field theory treatment, specializing to a pseudo-Dirac bino. The dark matter mass and the mass splitting can be extracted from measurements of the decay length and the invariant mass of the products, even in the presence of missing energy.