Applying Vector Boson Fusion Topologies to Search for Supersymmetric and Higgs Portal Dark Matter at the LHC

This work presents two searches for dark matter at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The first is focused on decays of the supersymmetric partner of the top quark, the stop quark $\bar{t}$. By exploiting vector boson fusion (VBF) topologies, the analysis shows a top squark with mass of 300 GeV and integrated luminosity of 300 fb$^{−1}$ can be probed at 5 σ significance with no systematic uncertainty. The second search is a study of Higgs portal dark matter (HPDM). In order to study HPDM, we consider two boosted channels. The first is a study of vector boson fusion production. Here we show the differences between the E/$_{T}$ distribution for HPDM and wino dark matter. We also show the significance as a function of DM mass. The second channel for HPDM is Z + H production of DM. In this case, we are interested in trying to differentate between fermionic, scalar, and vector DM. We show kinematic distributions for these three cases. Additionally, we consider the influence of the Higgs width on these kinematic distributions for the fermionic case.