Stopping Dark Mesons in Their Tracks with Long-Lived Particle and Resonant Signatures

Abstract

Dark sectors with confining gauge interactions can provide both simple dark matter candidates and striking signals at colliders. We recast Large Hadron Collider searches for two different signatures of dark mesons that arise from a strongly-coupled theory with vector-like dark quarks that are in some non-trivial representation of Standard Model SU(2)${}_L$. For any such electroweak representation, there is a 3-plet of dark mesons whose charged components are long-lived, and we reinterpret searches for disappearing tracks to place a lower bound on their mass of $\sim 1.2$ TeV. When the dark quarks are in SU(2)${}_L$ representations larger than the fundamental, there is also a 5-plet of dark mesons that interacts with the electroweak gauge bosons via a chiral anomaly. We show that the 5-plet is the unique non-trivial meson multiplet with this anomaly and recast searches for the resulting diboson resonances to place bounds on model parameters. With additional measurements, the anomaly also enables one to reconstruct some ultraviolet parameters (the numbers of dark flavors and colors) while only measuring states in the infrared. Each of these signals represents an exciting opportunity for future searches using higher luminosity.

arXiv comment24 pages + appendices, 7 figures, updated to match journal version

References in corpus (47)

• The automated computation of tree-level and next-to-leading order differential cross sections, and their matching to parton shower simulations
• The anti-k_t jet clustering algorithm
• FastJet user manual
• DELPHES 3, A modular framework for fast simulation of a generic collider experiment
• Dispelling the N^3 myth for the Kt jet-finder
• Minimal Dark Matter
• Echoes of a Hidden Valley at Hadron Colliders
• Big Bang Nucleosynthesis Constraints on Hadronically and Electromagnetically Decaying Relic Neutral Particles
• Phenomenology of Hidden Valleys at Hadron Colliders
• Emerging Jets
• Macroscopic Strings and "Quirks" at Colliders
• Review of strongly-coupled composite dark matter models and lattice simulations
• Footprints of New Strong Dynamics via Anomaly and the 750 GeV Diphoton
• Vectorlike Confinement at the LHC
• LHC Searches for Dark Sector Showers
• Dynamical generation of the weak and Dark Matter scales from strong interactions
• Triggering Soft Bombs at the LHC
• Discovering anomaly-mediated supersymmetry at the LHC
• Dark Matter as a weakly coupled Dark Baryon
• Stealth Dark Matter: Dark scalar baryons through the Higgs portal
• Perturbative benchmark models for a dark shower search program
• A flavoured dark sector
• Casting a graph net to catch dark showers
• The LHC Phenomenology of Vectorlike Confinement
• Dark Mesons at the LHC
• Collider phenomenology of Hidden Valley mediators of spin 0 or 1/2 with semivisible jets
• Quirks at the Tevatron and Beyond
• Big-bang nucleosynthesis with sub-GeV massive decaying particles
• Invisible charginos and neutralinos from gauge boson fusion : a way to explore anomaly mediation ?
• Light Hidden Mesons through the Z Portal
• Simplified Models for Displaced Dark Matter Signatures
• Minimal Dark Matter bound states at future colliders
• Probing Dark Matter with Disappearing Tracks at the LHC
• Composite Dark Matter from Strongly-Interacting Chiral Dynamics
• Stopping Quirks at the LHC
• Complementarity for Dark Sector Bound States
• New sensitivity of LHC measurements to Composite Dark Matter Models
• The Neutral Decay Modes of the Eta-Meson
• Slepton production from gauge boson fusion
• Dark Sector Glueballs at the LHC
• Effective Theories of Dark Mesons with Custodial Symmetry
• Collider constraints on dark mediators
• Diphotons from an Electroweak Triplet-Singlet
• An almost elementary Higgs: Theory and Practice
• Long lived charginos in Natural SUSY?
• Composite Dark Matter with Forbidden Annihilation
• Search for emerging jets in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13.6$ TeV with the ATLAS experiment