Neutrino alternatives for missing energy events at colliders

If the dark matter consists of a weakly interacting massive particle, it can be produced and studied at future collider experiments like those at the LHC. The production of collider-stable weakly interacting massive particles is characterized by hard scattering events with large missing transverse energy. Here we emphasize and discuss the fact that the discovery of events inconsistent with the standard model with large missing transverse energy need not point to the existence of new, collider-stable particles. We explore an alternative explanation where the only sources of missing transverse energy are standard model neutrinos. We present concrete examples of such scenarios, focusing on supersymmetric models with R-parity violation. We also discuss means of differentiating neutrino missing energy signals from the production of new collider-stable particles. These include both model-dependent signals, such as particle tags and flavor counts, as well as model-independent tests that attempt to measure the missing particle mass.