Photons, photon jets, and dark photons at 750 GeV and beyond

In new physics searches involving photons at the LHC, one challenge is to distinguish scenarios with isolated photons from models leading to "photon jets". For instance, in the context of the 750 GeV diphoton excess, it was pointed out that a true diphoton resonance [Formula: see text] can be mimicked by a process of the form [Formula: see text], where S is a new scalar with a mass of 750 GeV and a is a light pseudoscalar decaying to two collinear photons. Photon jets can be distinguished from isolated photons by exploiting the fact that a large fraction of photons convert to an [Formula: see text] pair inside the inner detector. In this note, we quantify this discrimination power, and we study how the sensitivity of future searches differs for photon jets compared to isolated photons. We also investigate how our results depend on the lifetime of the particle(s) decaying to the photon jet. Finally, we discuss the extension to [Formula: see text], where there are no photons at all but the dark photon [Formula: see text] decays to [Formula: see text] pairs. Our results will be useful in future studies of the putative 750 GeV signal, but also more generally in any new physics search involving hard photons.