Opening the Topological Portal to Dark Sectors with Colliders

Abstract

We study the phenomenology of the topological portal between QCD and pseudo-Nambu--Goldstone dark matter proposed in~\cite{Davighi:2024zip}. We construct a weakly coupled ultraviolet completion in which a vector mediator gauges a baryonic current of QCD for the light quark flavours, linking it to dark pions parametrizing the coset $SU(2)_D/U(1)_D$. As a concrete anomaly-free realisation, we gauge the leptophobic combination $B_1+B_2-2B_3$. This completion allows us to calculate thermal coannihilation beyond the regime of validity of the pion effective theory, including resonant mediator effects, and to test the resulting thermal target with boosted-dijet and monojet searches at the LHC, with LEP and bottomonium data, and with flavour observables. These collider signatures follow directly from the symmetry structure required by matching onto the topological portal. At low momentum transfer, the topological operator instead controls the decay of the heavier dark pion, which is long-lived. A future high-statistics $Z$ factory, such as FCC-ee, can probe the low-mass region where hadron-collider sensitivity deteriorates, providing complementary tests of the topological portal.