Global analysis of dark matter simplified models (DMSMs) with leptophilic spin-one mediators using the MasterCode framework

Abstract

Recent cosmological and astrophysical studies have shown that ordinary matter, which can be observed directly, only constitutes 15% of the total matter content of Universe. The remaining 85% is what cosmologists and astrophysicists termed as exotic matter. Exotic matter is any form of matter whose properties, behaviour and interactions differ from those observed in ordinary matter. Since they cannot be detected directly, anomalities in astrophysical observations can be evidence for their existence. These anomalities seem to favour a form of matter called Dark Matter (DM) as one of the highly plausible candidates for exotic matter. Hence, a collective group of theories known as Dark Matter Simplified Models (DMSMs) were developed to study this form of matter in greater detail. One thing to note about these theories is that they do not provide the identity of the DM particle. However, one of the objectives of these theories is to provide limits on the masses of DM particles. Hence, this would be one of the key results that would be presented in this thesis. Being theoretical models, the feasibility of DMSMs still needs to be validated by exper- imental results. Although a range of experiments have published a number of papers with regards to these limits, a global fit has yet to be conducted so as to gain a better understanding of these models. Although the MasterCode framework, which is actually a code package, was previously used to conduct global fits of Supersymmetric (SUSY) models to data from a variety of experiments, it can also be used to conduct global fits for a multitude of other models, including DMSMs. For these reasons, the MasterCode framework was employed to conduct these global fit for DMSMs.