Beyond the bump-hunt: A game plan for discovering dynamical dark matter at the LHC

Dynamical Dark Matter (DDM) is an alternative framework for dark-matter physics in which an ensemble of individual constituent fields with a spectrum of masses, lifetimes, and cosmological abundances collectively constitute the dark-matter candidate, and in which the traditional notion of dark-matter stability is replaced by a balancing between lifetimes and abundances across the ensemble. In this talk, we discuss the prospects for distinguishing between DDM ensembles and traditional dark-matter candidates at hadron colliders — and in particular, at the upgraded LHC — via the analysis of event-shape distributions of kine-matic variables. We also examine the correlations between these kinematic variables and other relevant collider variables in order to assess how imposing cuts on these additional variables may distort — for better or worse — their event-shape distributions.