Photon collider search strategy for sleptons and dark matter at the LHC

Abstract

We propose a search strategy using the LHC as a photon collider to open sensitivity to scalar lepton (slepton $\tilde{\ell }$) production with masses around 15 to 60 GeV above that of neutralino dark matter ${\tilde{\chi }}_1^0$. This region is favored by relic abundance and muon $(g-2{)}_{\mu }$ arguments. However, conventional searches are hindered by the irreducible diboson background. We overcome this obstruction by measuring initial state kinematics and the missing momentum four-vector in proton-tagged ultraperipheral collisions using forward detectors. We demonstrate sensitivity beyond LEP for slepton masses of up to 220 GeV for $15\lesssim \Delta m(\tilde{\ell },{\tilde{\chi }}_1^0)\lesssim 60$ GeV with 100 fb${}^{-1}$ of 13 TeV proton collisions. We encourage the LHC collaborations to open this forward frontier for discovering new physics.

4 pages + bibliography, 3 figures

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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Supersymmetric Interpretation of the Muon $g-2$ Anomaly
• A new approach to modelling elastic and inelastic photon-initiated production at the LHC: SuperChic 4
• gamma-UPC: Automated generation of exclusive photon-photon processes in ultraperipheral proton and nuclear collisions with varying form factors
• New physics searches with heavy-ion collisions at the LHC
• New physics and tau $g-2$ using LHC heavy ion collisions
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• Opportunities for new physics searches with heavy ions at colliders
• Quasistable charginos in ultraperipheral proton-proton collisions at the LHC
• Flipped $g_{\mu }-2$
• Ultraperipheral nuclear interactions
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• Dark photons from pions produced in ultraperipheral $PbPb$ collisions
• Physics perspectives of a CMS near-beam proton spectrometer at the HL-LHC
• Missing-mass search in forward-proton-tagged dilepton events with the ATLAS detector