Fake Dark Matter at Colliders

Understand

If the dark matter (DM) consists of a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP), it can be produced and studied at future collider experiments like those at the LHC.

• The production of collider-stable WIMPs is characterized by hard scattering events with large missing transverse energy.
• Here we point out that the discovery of this well-characterized DM signal may turn out to be a red herring.
• We explore an alternative explanation -- fake dark matter -- where the only sources of missing transverse energy are standard model neutrinos.