Stopping Quirks at the LHC

Abstract

Quirks are exotic particles charged under a new confining gauge group that can give rise to unique collider signatures, depending on their vector-like mass, quantum numbers, and the confinement scale. In this work, we consider the possibility that quirks produced at the LHC lose all of their kinetic energy through ionization loss before escaping the detector, and annihilate at a time when there are no active pp collisions. We recast an existing CMS search for out-of-time decays of R-hadrons to place new limits on quirk parameter space. We propose several simple modifications to the existing out-of-time search strategy that can give these searches sensitivity in regions of quirk parameter space not covered by any existing or proposed search strategy.

27 pages, 9 figures

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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Searching for long-lived particles beyond the Standard Model at the Large Hadron Collider
• Enhancing Sensitivities to Long-lived Particles with High Granularity Calorimeters at the LHC
• A Minimal Model for Neutral Naturalness and pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone Dark Matter
• Science and Project Planning for the Forward Physics Facility in Preparation for the 2024-2026 European Particle Physics Strategy Update
• The quirk signal at FASER and FASER 2
• A search for the decays of stopped long-lived particles at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV with the ATLAS detector
• Discovering Quirks through Timing at FASER and Future Forward Experiments at the LHC
• The quirk trajectory
• Uncovering quirk signal via energy loss inside tracker
• Jet Timing
• Visible Collider Signals of Natural Quirks
• Quirk SUEP
• Review of Neutral Naturalness
• Stopping Dark Mesons in Their Tracks with Long-Lived Particle and Resonant Signatures
• Letter of Intent: The Forward Physics Facility