Speaker
Description
Dark matter that is electrically neutral but couples to the electromagnetic current through higherdimensional
operators constitutes an interesting class of models. We investigate this class of models
at the Large Hadron Collider, focusing on the anapole moment operator in an effective field theory
(EFT) framework, and utilizing the vector boson fusion (VBF) topology. Assuming proton-proton
collisions at $sqrt (s) = 13$TeV, we present the VBF anapole dark matter (ADM) cross sections and
kinematic distributions as functions of the free parameters of the EFT, the cutoff scale and the
ADM mass m. We find that the distinctive VBF topology of two forward jets and large dijet
pseudorapidity gap is effective at reducing SM backgrounds, leading to a 5 $\sigma$ discovery reach for all
kinematically allowed ADM masses with $\Lambda <\leq 1.62$ (1.1) TeV, assuming an integrated luminosity of
3000 (100) $fb^-1$.
