Strategies for Probing Non-Minimal Dark Sectors at Colliders: The Interplay Between Cuts and Kinematic Distributions

Understand

In this paper, we examine the strategies and prospects for distinguishing between traditional dark-matter models and models with non-minimal dark sectors --- including models of Dynamical Dark Matter (DDM) --- at hadron colliders.

• For concreteness, we focus on events with two hadronic jets and large missing transverse energy at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
• As we discuss, simple "bump-hunting" searches are not sufficient; probing non-minimal dark sectors typically requires an analysis of the actual shapes of the distributions of relevant kinematic variables.
• We therefore begin by identifying those kinematic variables whose distributions are particularly suited to this task.