Dark Sector Glueballs at the LHC

Abstract

We study confining dark sectors where the lightest hadrons are glueballs. Such models can provide viable dark matter candidates and appear in some neutral naturalness scenarios. In this work, we introduce a new phenomenological model of dark glueball hadronization inspired by the Lund string model. This enables us to make realistic predictions for dark glueball phenomenology at the LHC for the first time. Our model reproduces the expected thermal distribution of hadron species as an emergent consequence of hadronization dynamics. The ability to predict the production of glueball states heavier than the lightest species significantly expands the reach of long-lived glueball searches in MATHUSLA compared to previous simplified estimates. We also characterize regions of parameter space where emerging and/or semivisible jets could arise from pure-glue dark sectors, thereby providing new benchmark models that motivate searches for these signatures.

27 pages + appendices + references, 11 + 4 figures; journal edits, including new section on total hadron multiplicities

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Dark sector searches with the CMS experiment
• Dark Matter from Dark Glueball Dominance
• Search for light long-lived particles decaying to displaced jets in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13.6 TeV
• Semi-visible jets, energy-based models, and self-supervision
• Unsupervised and lightly supervised learning in particle physics
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