Spectral Decomposition of Missing Transverse Energy at Hadron Colliders

Abstract: We propose a spectral decomposition to systematically extract information of dark matter at hadron colliders. The differential cross section of events with missing transverse energy (MET) can be expressed by a linear combination of basis functions. In the case of $s$-channel mediator models for dark matter particle production, basis functions are identified with the differential cross sections of sub-processes of virtual mediator and visible particle production while the coefficients of basis functions correspond to dark matter invariant mass distribution in the manner of the K\"all\'en-Lehmann spectral decomposition. For a given MET data set and mediator model, we show that one can differentiate a certain dark matter-mediator interaction from another through spectral decomposition.