Inelastic dark matter from dark Higgs boson decays at FASER

Abstract

Abstract We consider inelastic dark matter scenarios with dark photon mediator and a dark Higgs boson. The dark Higgs boson spontaneously breaks the gauge symmetry associated with the dark photon, and gives the mass to the dark photon and the mass difference to dark particles. Such a dark Higgs boson can decay into the dark particles and hence can be another source of the dark particles at collider experiments. We analyze the sensitivity to decays of the excited state into the dark matter and charged particles at the FASER 2 experiment in fermion and scalar inelastic dark matter scenarios. We consider two mass spectra as illustrating examples in which the excited state can be produced only through the decay of dark Higgs boson. We show that unprobed parameter region can be explored in fermion dark matter scenario for the illustrating mass spectra.