Flavored Dark Matter and its Laboratory Tests

Abstract

In this talk, based on the paper 1109.3516, we consider theories where the dark matter particle carries lepton flavor quantum numbers, and has renormalizable contact interactions with the Standard Model fields. 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. In order to evaluate the collider prospects, 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 significant part of parameter space in these theories can be discovered above Standard Model backgrounds at the 14 TeV 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, similarly to a neutralino.