Uncovering tau leptons-enriched semi-visible jets at the LHC

Area of Science:

• High Energy Physics
• Particle Physics
• Cosmology

Background:

• The existence of dark sectors, interacting weakly with Standard Model particles, is a leading hypothesis for dark matter.
• Detecting such sectors at colliders like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) requires identifying unique signatures.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel signature for detecting dark sectors at the LHC.
• To investigate a simplified model featuring a mediator boson decaying into dark sector bound states and Standard Model particles.

Main Methods:

• Modeling proton-proton collisions with a QCD-like hidden sector.
• Developing a signature characterized by non-isolated lepton pairs within semi-visible jets.
• Utilizing supervised jet taggers and analyzing existing CMS and ATLAS data.
• Evaluating trigger performance and proposing new strategies for low-mass searches.

Main Results:

• Existing LHC data (Run 2) could exclude or discover the mediator boson up to 5.5 TeV under specific decay scenarios.
• New trigger strategies for Run 3 could extend sensitivity to mediator masses down to 700 GeV.
• The proposed signature involves semi-visible jets containing lepton pairs.

Conclusions:

• The proposed signature offers a promising avenue for dark sector confinement at the LHC.
• Optimized trigger strategies are crucial for exploring lower mass regions of dark sector candidates.