Flavored Dark Matter, and Its Implications for Direct Detection and Colliders

TL;DR

This paper explores theories where dark matter carries flavor quantum numbers, analyzing their implications for direct detection experiments and collider signatures, especially focusing on tau-flavored dark matter and its distinguishable collider signals.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of flavored dark matter models, detailing their unique collider signatures and direct detection prospects, with a focus on tau-flavored dark matter.

Findings

Dark matter with flavor quantum numbers can be detected by current experiments.

Tau-flavored dark matter models produce distinctive multi-lepton collider signatures.

Many models are discoverable at the LHC with proper analysis.

Abstract

We consider theories where the dark matter particle carries flavor quantum numbers, and has renormalizable contact interactions with the Standard Model fields. The phenomenology of this scenario depends sensitively on whether dark matter carries lepton flavor, quark flavor or its own internal flavor quantum numbers. We show that each of these possibilities is associated with a characteristic type of vertex, has different implications for direct detection experiments and gives rise to distinct collider signatures. We find that the region of parameter space where dark matter has the right abundance to be a thermal relic is in general within reach of current direct detection experiments. We focus on a class of models where dark matter carries tau flavor, and show that the collider signals of these models include events with four or more isolated leptons and missing energy. A full simulation of the signal and backgrounds, including detector effects, shows that in a significant part of parameter space these theories can be discovered above Standard Model backgrounds at the Large Hadron Collider. We also study the extent to which flavor and charge correlations among the final state leptons allows models of this type to be distinguished from theories where dark matter couples to leptons but does not carry flavor.