Discovering Dark Matter Through Flavor Violation at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel collider signature for dark matter detection involving flavor-violating interactions leading to a single top quark and missing energy, potentially observable at the LHC.

Contribution

It introduces new dark matter production mechanisms via flavor violation, expanding the search strategies beyond traditional methods.

Findings

Potential detection of dark matter at the 7 TeV LHC with limited data

Identification of flavor-violating signatures as a promising discovery channel

Analysis of models with flavor symmetries and their collider implications

Abstract

We show that the discovery channel for dark matter (DM) production at colliders can be through flavor violating interactions resulting in a novel signature of a single top and large missing transverse energy. We discuss several examples where the production of DM is dominated by flavor violating couplings: minimal flavor violating models with a large bottom Yukawa, models with horizontal symmetries, and DM in nontrivial flavor group representations. Discovery at the 7 TeV LHC with a few fb^-1 may already be possible.