Connecting Higgs to Dark Matter

The Higgs boson helps explain how particles obtain mass, so it seems fitting that it may offer the key to understanding dark matter, the dominant form of matter that—along with dark energy—makes up 95% of everything in the Universe. So-called Higgs-portal models assume that dark matter particles interact with normal particles through the exchange of a Higgs boson. If correct, then researchers would expect a dark matter signature in Higgs decays at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva. A new theoretical study removes some of the uncertainty in these models, improving the limits set by the LHC on dark matter candidates.