Rare $Z$ Boson Decays to a Hidden Sector

Abstract

We demonstrate that rare decays of the Standard Model $Z$ boson can be used to discover and characterize the nature of new hidden-sector particles. We propose new searches for these particles in soft, high-multiplicity leptonic final states at the Large Hadron Collider. The proposed searches are sensitive to low-mass particles produced in $Z$ decays, and we argue that these striking signatures can shed light on the hidden-sector couplings and mechanism for mass generation.

10 pages, 5 figures. Updated figures with the corrected public LHCb limit table. Version submitted to PRD

References in corpus (22)

• PYTHIA 6.4 Physics and Manual
• The automated computation of tree-level and next-to-leading order differential cross sections, and their matching to parton shower simulations
• An Introduction to PYTHIA 8.2
• Secluded WIMP Dark Matter
• Echoes of a Hidden Valley at Hadron Colliders
• Secluded U(1) below the weak scale
• Search for a dark photon in e+e- collisions at BABAR
• Illuminating Dark Photons with High-Energy Colliders
• Non-Abelian Dark Sectors and Their Collider Signatures
• Discovering the Higgs Through Highly-Displaced Vertices
• Probing a Secluded U(1) at B-factories
• Searches for electroweak production of charginos, neutralinos, and sleptons decaying to leptons and W, Z, and Higgs bosons in pp collisions at 8 TeV
• Phenomenology of Hidden Valleys at Hadron Colliders
• QCD radiation in the production of heavy colored particles at the LHC
• Neutralino Dark Matter at 14 and 100 TeV
• Model-Independent Jets plus Missing Energy Searches
• Search for long-lived particles that decay into final states containing two electrons or two muons in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV
• Search for long-lived neutral particles decaying into lepton jets in proton--proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector
• Measurement of the pp to ZZ production cross section and constraints on anomalous triple gauge couplings in four-lepton final states at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV
• Search for pair-produced long-lived neutral particles decaying in the ATLAS hadronic calorimeter in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 8 TeV
• Search for the dark photon and the dark Higgs boson at Belle
• Searching for dilepton resonances below the Z mass at the LHC

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Dark Higgs Bosons at Colliders
• Search for Dark Photons in Rare $Z$ Boson Decays with the ATLAS Detector