CMS-PAS-EXO-24-029

CMS-PAS-EXO-24-029
Search for $ s $-channel production of lepton-enriched semivisible jets in proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV
CMS Collaboration
2025-08-23

Abstract: A search for resonant production of strongly-coupled dark matter manifesting as lepton-enriched semivisible jets in proton-proton collisions at the LHC is presented. The search is performed using data collected by the CMS experiment during 2016--2018 at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV corresponding to a total integrated luminosity of 138 fb$ ^{-1} $. Final states with missing transverse momentum aligned to jets containing enhanced proportions of leptons are considered, as the signal jets are made of visible particles from the standard model sector and stable bound states from the dark sector. The analysis employs a machine learning-based strategy, utilizing both a graph neural network jet identification algorithm to discriminate between signal and background and a deep neural network-based approach to estimate the background in the signal region. Assuming the resonantly-produced mediator, a Z' boson, has a universal coupling of 0.25 to the standard model quarks, the search excludes mediator masses from 1.5 TeV up to 4.7 TeV at 95% confidence level, depending on the other signal model parameters. These results exclude a wide range of strongly-coupled dark matter models with lepton-enriched semivisible jet signatures for the first time.
Links: CDS record (PDF) ; Physics Briefing ; CADI line (restricted) ; These preliminary results are superseded in this paper, Submitted to EPJC. The superseded preliminary plots can be found here.

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