Including the Z in an Effective Field Theory for dark matter at the LHC

Abstract

An Effective Field Theory for dark matter at a TeV-scale hadron collider should include contact interactions of dark matter with the partons, the Higgs and the Z. This note estimates the impact of including dark matter-Z interactions on the complementarity of spin dependent direct detection and LHC monojet searches for dark matter. Their effect is small, because they are suppressed by electroweak couplings and the contact interaction self-consistency condition $C/\Lambda^2 < 4\pi/\hat{s}$. In this note, the contact interactions between the Z and dark matter are parametrised by derivative operators; this is convenient at colliders because such interactions do not match onto the quark-dark matter contact interactions.