The Pleasure of Smashing Things: Dark Matter Searches at the LHC

The era of precision cosmology revealed that 80% of the total amount of matter in the universe is dark. Cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements, galactic rotation curves, and gravitational lensing each provide strong evidence for the existence of dark matter. It is crucial to our understanding of the structure and evolution of the universe after the big bang and has been sought for decades. One promising candidate, motivated by both particle and astrophysics, is the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP). A production mechanism for WIMPs is through p-p collisions at the LHC. A motivated signature for dark matter, large amounts of missing energy, poses a unique set of challenges to the experiments. I will present an overview of searches for dark matter performed using data from Run 1 with the ATLAS and CMS experiments, prospects for future collider searches, as well as how these searches complement other detection techniques.

Speaker: Regina Caputo, UC Santa Cruz