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

Understand

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.