Discovering Dark Matter Through Flavor Violation at the LHC

Abstract

We show that the discovery channel for dark matter (DM) production at colliders can be through flavor violating interactions resulting in a novel signature of a single top and large missing transverse energy. We discuss several examples where the production of DM is dominated by flavor violating couplings: minimal flavor violating models with a large bottom Yukawa, models with horizontal symmetries, and DM in nontrivial flavor group representations. Discovery at the 7 TeV LHC with a few fb^-1 may already be possible.