Dark matter signals in dilepton production at hadron colliders

We show that new physics can show up in dileptonic events through its radiative contributions to the dilepton invariant mass, leading to unique monocline features in m(ll), as well as the angular distribution of the leptons. We focus in particular on the case of dark matter with scalar messengers coupling it to the quarks and leptons. Consistent thermal models require the dark matter to have masses of 100s of GeV and have. 1 couplings to the Standard Model (SM), implying that radiative corrections to the SM Drell-Yan rate can be sizable. We consider the case of Majorana, Dirac, and pseudo-Dirac dark matter and show that there are regions of parameter space where the nonexistence of a monocline, which starts at roughly twice the dark matter mass, m(ll) similar to 2m(x), places the strongest constraint on the model. We make predictions for the sensitivities at the high luminosity 14 TeV LHC as well as a future 100 TeV proton-proton collider. We find that our dilepton signal is most sensitive when the mediator and the dark matter are nearly degenerate and conventional missing-transverse-momentum-based searches are least sensitive.