Counting dark matter particles at the LHC

by Rakhi Mahbubani

Wednesday 26 Oct 2011, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Theory Conference Room (CERN)

I will argue that trying to count the number of invisible particles produced in missing energy events at the LHC is not only useful, potentially strengthening the hypothesis that the invisible particle constitutes stable dark matter, but also possible. I will give details of the method, which consists of fitting shapes of certain transverse- or invariant-mass distributions. I will also discuss various effects that may affect the measurement, and present examples where the method is used to count invisible neutrinos in Standard Model processes and dark matter candidates in new physics processes.