- Physical Review Journals
All JournalsPhysics Magazine

Physical Review D

Reuse & Permissions

It is not necessary to obtain permission to reuse this article or its components as it is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI are maintained. Please note that some figures may have been included with permission from other third parties. It is your responsibility to obtain the proper permission from the rights holder directly for these figures.

Export citation

Export citation

Choose format for download:

Download Citation
  • Open Access

LHC-friendly freeze-in dark matter via the Higgs portal

Xinyue Yin1, Shuai Xu2, and Sibo Zheng1,*

  • *Contact author: sibozheng.zju@gmail.com
PDF

Phys. Rev. D 112, 035034 – Published 25 August, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/sc6v-9jct

Abstract

It is known that single-field freeze-in dark matter barely leaves footprints in dark matter direct detection and collider experiments. This situation can be altered in the two-field context. In this work we propose a two-field freeze-in dark matter model through the Higgs portal. The observed dark matter relic abundance is obtained by a decay of scalar mediator thermalized in the early Universe. While there is a lack of direct dark matter signals, the scalar mediator is in the reach of High Luminosity LHC either through the vector boson fusion or mono-Z channels. Within the allowed scalar mass window of 10–50 GeV, we use improved cuts to derive both 2σ exclusion and 5σ discovery limits, depending on the value of Higgs portal coupling. If verified, this scalar mediator signal allows us to infer the freeze-in dark matter.

View figure in article

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Article Text

References (57)

  1. G. Arcadi, D. Cabo-Almeida, M. Dutra, P. Ghosh, M. Lindner, Y. Mambrini, J. P. Neto, M. Pierre, S. Profumo, and F. S. Queiroz, Eur. Phys. J. C 85, 152 (2025).
  2. M. Cirelli, A. Strumia, and J. Zupan, arXiv:2406.01705.
  3. L. J. Hall, K. Jedamzik, J. March-Russell, and S. M. West, J. High Energy Phys. 03 (2010) 080.
  4. K. Langhoff, N. J. Outmezguine, and N. L. Rodd, Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 241101 (2022).
  5. M. Jain, A. Maggi, W. Y. Ai, and D. J. E. Marsh, J. High Energy Phys. 11 (2024) 166.
  6. T. Asaka, K. Ishiwata, and T. Moroi, Phys. Rev. D 73, 051301 (2006).
  7. M. Becker, Eur. Phys. J. C 79, 611 (2019).
  8. M. Chianese and S. F. King, J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys. 09 (2018) 027.
  9. A. Datta, R. Roshan, and A. Sil, Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 231801 (2021).
  10. B. Holdom, Phys. Lett. 166B, 196 (1986).
  11. Z. Xu, Q. Zhou, and S. Zheng, Phys. Rev. D 110, 115003 (2024).
  12. Z. Xu and S. Zheng, Phys. Rev. D 111, 063525 (2025).
  13. D. Cadamuro and J. Redondo, J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys. 02 (2012) 032.
  14. G. Vertongen and C. Weniger, J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys. 05 (2011) 027.
  15. R. Essig, E. Kuflik, S. D. McDermott, T. Volansky, and K. M. Zurek, J. High Energy Phys. 11 (2013) 193.
  16. T. Cohen, K. Murase, N. L. Rodd, B. R. Safdi, and Y. Soreq, Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 021102 (2017).
  17. E. D. Kovetz, V. Poulin, V. Gluscevic, K. K. Boddy, R. Barkana, and M. Kamionkowski, Phys. Rev. D 98, 103529 (2018).
  18. H. Liu, N. J. Outmezguine, D. Redigolo, and T. Volansky, Phys. Rev. D 100, 123011 (2019).
  19. T. Hambye, M. H. G. Tytgat, J. Vandecasteele, and L. Vanderheyden, Phys. Rev. D 98, 075017 (2018).
  20. A. G. Hessler, A. Ibarra, E. Molinaro, and S. Vogl, J. High Energy Phys. 01 (2017) 100.
  21. A. Ghosh, T. Mondal, and B. Mukhopadhyaya, J. High Energy Phys. 12 (2017) 136.
  22. L. Calibbi, L. Lopez-Honorez, S. Lowette, and A. Mariotti, J. High Energy Phys. 09 (2018) 037.
  23. G. Bélanger, N. Desai, A. Goudelis, J. Harz, A. Lessa, J. M. No, A. Pukhov, S. Sekmen, D. Sengupta, B. Zaldivar et al., J. High Energy Phys. 02 (2019) 186.
  24. G. ’t Hooft, NATO Sci. Ser. B 59, 135 (1980).
  25. V. Silveira and A. Zee, Phys. Lett. 161B, 136 (1985).
  26. J. McDonald, Phys. Rev. D 50, 3637 (1994).
  27. C. P. Burgess, M. Pospelov, and T. ter Veldhuis, Nucl. Phys. B619, 709 (2001).
  28. J. M. Cline, K. Kainulainen, P. Scott, and C. Weniger, Phys. Rev. D 88, 055025 (2013); 92, 039906(E) (2015).
  29. H. Han and S. Zheng, J. High Energy Phys. 12 (2015) 044.
  30. H. Han, J. M. Yang, Y. Zhang, and S. Zheng, Phys. Lett. B 756, 109 (2016).
  31. G. Alguero, G. Belanger, F. Boudjema, S. Chakraborti, A. Goudelis, S. Kraml, A. Mjallal, and A. Pukhov, Comput. Phys. Commun. 299, 109133 (2024).
  32. N. Aghanim et al. (Planck Collaboration), Astron. Astrophys. 641, A6 (2020); 652, C4(E) (2021).
  33. J. L. Feng, A. Rajaraman, and F. Takayama, Phys. Rev. D 68, 063504 (2003).
  34. D. Hooper, F. S. Queiroz, and N. Y. Gnedin, Phys. Rev. D 85, 063513 (2012).
  35. E. Aprile et al. (XENON Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 111302 (2018).
  36. Y. Meng et al. (PandaX-4T Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 261802 (2021).
  37. J. Aalbers et al. (LZ Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 041002 (2023).
  38. P. Adari et al. (SENSEI Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 011804 (2025).
  39. K. Aggarwal et al. (DAMIC-M Collaboration), arXiv:2503.14617.
  40. M. Aaboud et al. (ATLAS Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 231801 (2019).
  41. A. Alloul, N. D. Christensen, C. Degrande, C. Duhr, and B. Fuks, Comput. Phys. Commun. 185, 2250 (2014).
  42. J. Alwall, R. Frederix, S. Frixione, V. Hirschi, F. Maltoni, O. Mattelaer, H. S. Shao, T. Stelzer, P. Torrielli, and M. Zaro, J. High Energy Phys. 07 (2014) 079.
  43. T. Sjostrand, S. Mrenna, and P. Z. Skands, J. High Energy Phys. 05 (2006) 026.
  44. J. de Favereau, C. Delaere, P. Demin, A. Giammanco, V. Lemaître, A. Mertens, and M. Selvaggi (delphes3 Collaboration), J. High Energy Phys. 02 (2014) 057.
  45. T. Chen and C. Guestrin, KDD ’16: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (2016), arXiv:1603.02754.
  46. Q. Mou and S. Zheng, Adv. High Energy Phys. 2018, 9314613 (2018).
  47. G. Aad et al. (ATLAS Collaboration), Phys. Rev. D 103, 112006 (2021).
  48. G. Aad et al. (ATLAS Collaboration), Phys. Lett. B 842, 137963 (2023).
  49. S. Chatrchyan et al. (CMS Collaboration), Eur. Phys. J. C 74, 2980 (2014).
  50. A. Tumasyan et al. (CMS Collaboration), Phys. Rev. D 105, 092007 (2022).
  51. G. Aad et al. (ATLAS Collaboration), J. High Energy Phys. 08 (2022) 104.
  52. E. Conte, B. Fuks, and G. Serret, Comput. Phys. Commun. 184, 222 (2013).
  53. V. Khachatryan et al. (CMS Collaboration), Phys. Rev. D 93, 052011 (2016); 97, 099903(E) (2018).
  54. A. M. Sirunyan et al. (CMS Collaboration), J. High Energy Phys. 03 (2017) 061; 09 (2017) 106(E).
  55. A. M. Sirunyan et al. (CMS Collaboration), Eur. Phys. J. C 78, 291 (2018).
  56. A. M. Sirunyan et al. (CMS Collaboration), Eur. Phys. J. C 81, 13 (2021); 81, 333(E) (2021).
  57. M. Cepeda, S. Gori, P. Ilten, M. Kado, F. Riva, R. Abdul Khalek, A. Aboubrahim, J. Alimena, S. Alioli, A. Alves et al., CERN Yellow Rep. Monogr. 7, 221 (2019).

Outline

Information

Phys. Rev. D 112, 035034– Published 25 August, 2025
  • Received 27 January 2025
  • Accepted 29 July 2025
Crossmark - Check for updates button
Creative Commons Logo

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

Published by the American Physical Society

Sign In to Your Journals Account

Filter

Filter

Article Lookup

Enter a citation