Motivated by the recent proliferation of observed astrophysical anomalies,
Arkani-Hamed et al. have proposed a model in which dark matter is charged under
a non-abelian "dark" gauge symmetry that is broken at ~ 1 GeV. In this paper,
we present a survey of concrete models realizing such a scenario, followed by a
largely model-independent study of collider phenomenology relevant to the
Tevatron and the LHC. We address some model building issues that are easily
surmounted to accommodate the astrophysics. While SUSY is not necessary, we
argue that it is theoretically well-motivated because the GeV scale is
automatically generated. Specifically, we propose a novel mechanism by which
mixed D-terms in the dark sector induce either SUSY breaking or a super-Higgs
mechanism precisely at a GeV. Furthermore, we elaborate on the original
proposal of Arkani-Hamed et al. in which the dark matter acts as a messenger of
gauge mediation to the dark sector. In our collider analysis we present
cross-sections for dominant production channels and lifetime estimates for
primary decay modes. We find that dark gauge bosons can be produced at the
Tevatron and the LHC, either through a process analogous to prompt photon
production or through a rare Z decay channel. Dark gauge bosons will decay back
to the SM via "lepton jets" which typically contain >2 and as many as 8
leptons, significantly improving their discovery potential. Since SUSY decays
from the MSSM will eventually cascade down to these lepton jets, the discovery
potential for direct electroweak-ino production may also be improved.
Exploiting the unique kinematics, we find that it is possible to reconstruct
the mass of the MSSM LSP. We also present decay channels with displaced
vertices and multiple leptons with partially correlated impact parameters.Comment: 44 pages, 25 figures, version published in JHE
