Mono-Higgs-boson: A new collider probe of dark matter

We explore the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) phenomenology of dark matter (DM) pair production in association with a 125-GeV Higgs boson. This signature, dubbed mono-Higgs, appears as a single Higgs boson plus missing energy from DM particles escaping the detector. We perform an LHC background study for mono-Higgs signals at root s = 8 and 14 TeV for four Higgs boson decay channels: gamma gamma, bb, ZZ* -> 4l, and lljj. We estimate the LHC sensitivities to a variety of new physics scenarios within the frameworks of both effective operators and simplified models. For all of these scenarios, the.. channel provides the best sensitivity, whereas the b (b) over bar channel suffers from a large t (t) over bar background. Mono-Higgs is unlike other mono-X searches (X jet, photon, etc.) since the Higgs boson is unlikely to be radiated as initial state radiation and therefore probes the underlying DM vertex directly.