Opening the Topological Portal to Dark Sectors with Colliders
Abstract
We study the phenomenology of the topological portal between QCD and pseudo-Nambu--Goldstone dark matter proposed in~\cite{Davighi:2024zip}. We construct a weakly coupled ultraviolet completion in which a vector mediator gauges a baryonic current of QCD for the light quark flavours, linking it to dark pions parametrizing the coset SU(2)D/U(1)D. As a concrete anomaly-free realisation, we gauge the leptophobic combination B1+B2−2B3. This completion allows us to calculate thermal coannihilation beyond the regime of validity of the pion effective theory, including resonant mediator effects, and to test the resulting thermal target with boosted-dijet and monojet searches at the LHC, with LEP and bottomonium data, and with flavour observables. These collider signatures follow directly from the symmetry structure required by matching onto the topological portal. At low momentum transfer, the topological operator instead controls the decay of the heavier dark pion, which is long-lived. A future high-statistics Z factory, such as FCC-ee, can probe the low-mass region where hadron-collider sensitivity deteriorates, providing complementary tests of the topological portal.
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BibTeX
@misc{davighi2026opening,
title = {{Opening the Topological Portal to Dark Sectors with Colliders}},
author = {Joe Davighi and Admir Greljo and Lia Schöneweiß and Nudzeim Selimovic},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.10681},
eprint = {2609.10681},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10681},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Opening the Topological Portal to Dark Sectors with Colliders
AU - Joe Davighi
AU - Admir Greljo
AU - Lia Schöneweiß
AU - Nudzeim Selimovic
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/09
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.10681
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10681
AB - We study the phenomenology of the topological portal between QCD and pseudo-Nambu--Goldstone dark matter proposed in~\cite{Davighi:2024zip}. We construct a weakly coupled ultraviolet completion in which a vector mediator gauges a baryonic current of QCD for the light quark flavours, linking it to dark pions parametrizing the coset SU(2)_D/U(1)_D. As a concrete anomaly-free realisation, we gauge the leptophobic combination B_1+B_2−2B_3. This completion allows us to calculate thermal coannihilation beyond the regime of validity of the pion effective theory, including resonant mediator effects, and to test the resulting thermal target with boosted-dijet and monojet searches at the LHC, with LEP and bottomonium data, and with flavour observables. These collider signatures follow directly from the symmetry structure required by matching onto the topological portal. At low momentum transfer, the topological operator instead controls the decay of the heavier dark pion, which is long-lived. A future high-statistics Z factory, such as FCC-ee, can probe the low-mass region where hadron-collider sensitivity deteriorates, providing complementary tests of the topological portal.
ER -