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Project

Search for Interactions of Top Quarks with Dark Matter with the CMS Experiment at the LHC. (FWOTM778)

When looking at the content of the universe, it is surprising that we only understand less than 5 percent of it. About 25 percent of it is made from what we call dark matter and some other 70 percent is the even more mysterious dark energy. Although many observations support the existence of dark matter, it remains a large mystery what it actually is and the standard model of particle physics does not provide a suitable dark matter candidate. Therefore it is clear that the standard model needs to be extended. A description of a dark matter candidate should be a part of that, as well as how it interacts with the standard model particles we know today. Because of this, dark matter can be expected to be created in particle accelerators like the LHC at CERN. Our research starts from the hypothesis that dark matter interacts with the standard model through interactions with top quarks, which are the heaviest quarks known today. We also incorporate the possibility that this interaction between top quarks and dark matter may change the flavour of the quark, turning it for example into the much lighter charm quark. For this reason it is very important to be able to identify these charm quarks inside the CMS detector at the LHC. The identification of jets originating from charm quarks is known as c-tagging, and is new for CMS. We will develop and use this for the search for flavor changing interactions between top quarks and dark matter at the LHC.
Date:1 Oct 2015 →  30 Sep 2019
Keywords:Dark Matter
Disciplines:Diagnostic radiology