Looking for a hidden sector in exotic Higgs boson decays with the ATLAS experiment

Abstract

The nature of dark matter (DM) is one of the most intriguing questions in particle physics. DM can be postulated to be part of a hidden sector whose interactions with the visible matter are not completely decoupled. The discovery of a fundamental scalar particle compatible with the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model paves the way for looking for DM with novel methods. An overview of the searches looking for a hidden sector in exotic Higgs decays and for invisible decays of the Higgs boson within the ATLAS experiment is presented. Prospects for searches with Large Hadron Collider data at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV are summarized.