Fake Dark Matter at Colliders

Abstract

If the dark matter (DM) consists of a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP), it can be produced and studied at future collider experiments like those at the LHC. The production of collider-stable WIMPs is characterized by hard scattering events with large missing transverse energy. Here we point out that the discovery of this well-characterized DM signal may turn out to be a red herring. We explore an alternative explanation -- fake dark matter -- where the only sources of missing transverse energy are standard model neutrinos. We present examples of such models, focusing on supersymmetric models with R-parity violation. We also briefly discuss means of differentiating fake dark matter from the production of new collider-stable particles.

11 pages, 3 figures, revtex; references added

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Dark Matter Particle Spectroscopy at the LHC: Generalizing MT2 to Asymmetric Event Topologies
• A Review of the Mass Measurement Techniques proposed for the Large Hadron Collider
• Superpartner mass measurements with 1D decomposed MT2
• Radiative contribution to neutrino masses and mixing in $\mu \nu$SSM
• Measurement of masses in the t t-bar system by kinematic endpoints in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV
• Resolving Combinatorial Ambiguities in Dilepton $t\bar{t}$ Event Topologies with Constrained $M_2$ Variables
• How to prove that the LHC did not discover dark matter
• The Lightest Massive Invisible Particles at the LHC
• Measuring the Mass of Dark Matter at the LHC