Novel Multilepton Signatures from the Fermionic Portal to Vector Dark Matter

Abstract

We perform a collider study of a novel multilepton signature arising from pair production of heavy vector-like leptons followed by cascade decays through a dark sector. In the muonic realisation of the Fermionic Portal to Vector Dark Matter, this process can lead to final states with four, six, eight, or ten visible muons, depending on the dark-sector spectrum and branching pattern. We identify the six-muon channel as the most powerful target: it remains sizeable over a broad region of parameter space, while being less rate-suppressed than the higher-multiplicity channels and much cleaner and more reconstructable than the four-muon final state. The signal arises from Drell--Yan pair production of vector-like muons, $pp\toμ'^{+}μ'^{-}$, followed by decays through the dark vector $V'$ and the dark scalar $H_D$. The six-muon final state receives contributions from symmetric decay topologies in which each $μ'$ yields three visible muons, and from the asymmetric topology in which one chain yields one muon and the other yields five. The six-lepton signature from vector-like-lepton pair production has not previously been explored at the LHC. We therefore develop a topology-based reconstruction which exploits the repeated dimuon, trimuon, and five-muon resonance structure of the signal. We simulate signal and Standard Model backgrounds at detector level, including a dedicated treatment of rare heavy-flavour muons. The resulting background after the six-muon selection and topology reconstruction is negligible. Existing Run-2 multilepton searches already constrain part of the low-mass parameter space, but they do not exploit the repeated resonance structure of the signal. A dedicated six-muon search can substantially extend the reach. At the HL-LHC, the proposed analysis can probe vector-like muon masses up to about $1.9$ TeV for favourable spectra.