The Search for Dark Matter in the Mono-Photon Channel

Objective

     We are searching for the presence of new phenomena in LHC collision events that contain one high-energy photon and a lot of missing in the transverse (x-y) plane; these new phenomena could be likely candidates for Dark Matter particles, as those have yet to be detected and could account for the missing transverse energy. The mono-photon channels that we will be searching include the Zγ->ννγ and Wγ->lνγ channel as these likely account for a majority of the undetectable background that we must account for. The method for which we will approach the will be two-part: (1) generation of Monte-Carlo simulations as to have an expectation for what data we might find and (2) to compare that Simulation data to actual CMS data to find discrepancies between the two. Programs that we will be using include MadGraph (for parton interactions), Pythia (for hadronization and fragmentation of MadGraph data), and ROOT (to visualize plots of our data). 

Here are a collection of papers from the CMS collaboration relating to Mono-Photon events and backgrounds that we will be dealing with:

• http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.8812 - Dark Matter status through Mono-Photon events

• http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.6832 - Wγ and Zγ cross-section measurements

• http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.1117 - Z(vv)γ cross-section measurement

• http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.05664 - Zγ cross-section at higher integrated luminosities

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