Perturbative benchmark models for a dark shower search program

Abstract

We provide five benchmark hidden valley models with perturbative parton showers, which span a wide range of dark shower phenomenology. We consider production through an $s$-channel, heavy mediator, which can be identified with the SM Higgs. By assuming a set of well-motivated decay portals, one can moreover fix both the branching ratios of the dark mesons and set a lower bound on their lifetime. We provide a public python tool which can be used to generate self-consistent PYTHIA 8 cards for our benchmark models.

Comments: 17 pages, 10 figures, python code available at https://gitlab.com/simonknapen/dark_showers_tool Journal version. Compared to v1, a conceptual error was corrected related to the interpretation of the pythia hadronization module. Conclusions unchanged