Benchmarks for Dark Matter Searches at the LHC

Understand

We propose some scenarios to pursue dark matter searches at the LHC in a fairly model-independent way.

• The first benchmark case is dark matter co-annihilations with coloured particles (gluinos or squarks being special examples).
• We determine the masses that lead to the correct thermal relic density including, for the first time, strong Sommerfeld corrections taking into account colour decomposition.
• In the second benchmark case we consider dark matter that couples to SM particles via the Z or the Higgs.