A search for dark matter with bottom quarks

Abstract

Despite making up over 80% of the matter in the universe, very little is known about dark matter. Its only well-established property is that it interacts gravitationally, but does not interact with ordinary matter through any of the other known forces. Specific details such as the number of dark matter particles, their quantum properties, and their interactions remain elusive and are only loosely constrained by experiments. In this dissertation I describe a novel search for a particular type of dark matter that couples preferentially to heavy quarks, using LHC proton-proton collisions at ATLAS. With a model-independent framework, comparisons are made to results obtained from other dark matter searches, and new limits are set on various interaction strengths.