Physics from the First Year of the CMS Experiment

There are very good reasons why the Large Hadron Collider could produce dark matter particles. Dark matter is a mysterious form of matter that is now known to be more than five times as abundant as normal matter.  For almost a century, cosmological evidence has been building toward the inescapable conclusion that enormous galaxies and galactic clusters are lodged inside even larger regions filled with something we cannot see or touch but affects their motion and form. In the same span of time, physicists have constructed the Standard Model of particle physics that provides an unprecedented understanding of nuclear and electromagnetic forces and particles but gives no clues about the nature of dark matter.  The Standard Model is, however, incomplete. Some of the best-motivated new theoretical models that help to complete it also provide excellent candidates for dark matter particles that could be produced at the LHC. In this talk, I will briefly present the history of dark matter, which lies at the forefront of modern cosmology and particle physics, and then describe what we think dark matter may be and how we can make and study it at the LHC.