The Search for Dark Matter Through Soft Unclustered Energy Patterns at CMS

Overview

Soft unclustered energy patterns (SUEPs) have signatures of spherically symmetric, high multiplicity showers of low-energy particles. Despite being a potential candidate for dark matter, SUEPs have remained unexplored as these events resemble pileup and are recorded with traditional triggers with very low efficiency. Here, strategies are developed for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) particle detector to separate SUEP candidates from the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) background by investigating Monte Carlo simulations of SUEP and background events. The FastJet algorithm clusters tracks to form SUEP candidates for analysis. The discriminatory power of our variable selection, which is measured through σexp/σtheory, is tested before and after boosting into the SUEP candidate frame for several different heavy scalar mediator masses. At S = 400 GeV, the selection on the boosted FW2M variable (σexp/σtheory = 0.17578) marginally surpasses in discrimination than other boosted jet shape variables such as sphericity (σexp/σtheory = 0.18066) and aplanarity (σexp/σtheory = 0.18555). At higher mass benchmarks (S ≥ 750 GeV), SUEP candidates are fully separated from the background for all selections (σexp/σtheory σ 1). Thus, boosting is a necessary approach for discriminating SUEP candidates, especially for low mass scalar mediators with S ≤ 400 GeV.

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