Speaker
Description
The unprecedented proton-proton collision energy and the large data volumes reached by the LHC and the CMS detector with supreme particle detection capabilities provide a unique setting for discovering the particle constituting the dark matter. Since the beginning of the LHC, there were various DM searches within the CMS experiment. With this analysis, we embark on a novel search for axion-like dark matter particles in proton-proton collisions at the LHC. The hypothetical axion particle was first proposed to address the famous strong-CP problem in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). Since then, such pseudo-scalar particles, dubbed axion-like-particles (ALPs), have been incorporated in various well motivated theoretical models that extend the SM, and have been sought for in vastly different experiments. The mass of ALPs and their interaction strength with the SM particles are generally free parameters, and depending on the model ALPs can either constitute a viable candidate for DM or a portal to a more extended dark sector. The CMS and ATLAS experiments have searched for ALPs using Run 2 data, however these searches target ALP production via Higgs boson or other scalar particles and only decay to two collimated photons are considered. This work aims to add a complementary phase-space to these searches with a completely new production and decay channel that was experimentally never explored. Our goal is the search for the production of axion-like particles from proton-proton collisions at √s = 13.6 TeV at the CERN LHC, using the data collected by the CMS detector. There are two main study fronts: exotic top quark decays and single top + ALP production. Both research directions represent a t+a signature (where a stands for ALP) that is amenable to a search in the collisions produced by the LHC. In summary, we propose to use LHC Run 3 data to search for axion-like particles as a viable DM candidate in production and decay that was never explored before experimentally. The success of this effort relies on innovative analysis techniques to tackle the triggering, signal reconstruction, and estimation of background processes.