Measuring Dark Matter at Colliders

Abstract

We investigate the need and prospects for measuring dark matter properties at particle collider experiments. We discuss the connections between the inferred properties of particle dark matter and the physics that is expected to be uncovered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the International Linear Collider (ILC) and motivate the necessity of measuring detailed dark matter properties at a collider. We then investigate a model-independent signature of dark matter at a collider and discuss its observability. We next examine the prospects for making precise measurements of dark matter properties using two example points in minimal supergravity (mSUGRA) parameter space. One of the primary difficulties encountered in such measurements is lack of constraint on the masses of unobservable heavy states. We discuss a new method for experimentally deriving estimates for such heavy masses and then conclude.