Tracking down quirks at the Large Hadron Collider

Journal Article · 19 December 2017 · Physical Review D

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.96.115015 · OSTI ID:1544346

Knapen, Simon ^[1]; Lou, Hou Keong ^[1]; Papucci, Michele ^[1]; Setford, Jack ^[2]

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1. Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States); Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
2. Univ. of Sussex, Brighton (United Kingdom)

Non-helical tracks are the smoking gun signature of charged and/or colored quirks, which are pairs of particles bound by a new, long-range confining force. We introduce an approach to efficiently search for these non-helical tracks at the LHC, without the need to fit their trajectories. We show that the hits corresponding to quirky trajectories can be selected efficiently by searching for co-planar hits in the inner layers of the ATLAS and CMS trackers, even in the presence of on average 50 pile-up vertices. We further argue that backgrounds from photon conversions and unassociated pile-up hits can be removed almost entirely, while maintaining a signal reconstruction efficiency as high as ~70%. With the 300 fb^₋1 dataset, this implies a discovery potential for string tension between 100 eV and 30 keV, and colored (electroweak charged) quirks as heavy as 1600 (650) GeV may be discovered.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC); National Science Foundation (NSF); USDOE
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231
• OSTI ID: 1544346
• Alternate ID(s): OSTI ID: 1414049
• Journal Information: Physical Review D, Vol. 96, Issue 11; ISSN 2470-0010
• Publisher: American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English