RE: A hitch-hiker guide for dark matter searches at particle colliders

Thanks a lot for this valuable feedback. As an author, we can never be sure the blog is written well enough for the audience to understand it (although I do my best).

Now to Dark Matter: I understand that you need a mediator particle to interact (connect) the dark matter particle with the standard model. The result of this coupling will not be directly observable (the dark matter particle), but the consequence will be.

The above sentence is a bit confusing to me. I can understand in two ways and will try to comment both of them (hopefully one of the two will be the good one).

• A non-vanishing "dark matter - mediator - standard model" coupling (in the model considered) has always consequences. These consequences are that there is a dark matter signal to potentially observe at colliders. However, once the signal is found, we can go back to the coupling itself. It is thus not the coupling that is invisible, but the dark matter properties that are not directly measurable,
• The invisible component is the dark matter particle. It is so weakly interacting that once produced, it escapes the detector invisibly. However, energy and momentum are conserved. so that dark matter production results in an energy and momentum imbalance that can then be used to reconstruct the properties of dark matter. Somehow, the visible leads to the invisible.

PS: I smiled a lot when I choose that title too, and precisely for the reason you pointed ;)