RT Journal Article
T1 Exclusive displaced hadronic signatures in the LHC forward region
A1 Cid Vidal, Xabier
A1 Tsai, Yuhsin
A1 Zurita, Jose
K1 Beyond Standard Model
K1 Higgs Physics
AB The LHCb detector provides accurate vertex reconstruction and hadronic particle identification, which make the experiment an ideal place to look for light long-livedparticles (LLP) decaying into Standard Model (SM) hadrons. In contrast with the typicalsearch strategy relying on energetic jets and a high multiplicity of tracks from the LLPdecay, LHCb can identify LLPs in exclusive, specific hadronic final states. To illustrate theidea, we study the sensitivity of LHCb to an exotic Higgs decay h → SS, followed by thedisplaced decay of GeV-scale scalars into charged kaons S → K+K−. We show that thereconstruction of kaon vertices in narrow invariant mass windows can efficiently eliminatethe combinatorial backgrounds from B-meson decays. While the same signal is extremelydifficult to probe in the existing displaced jet searches at ATLAS/CMS, the LHCb searchwe propose can probe the branching ratio BR(h → SS) down to 0.1% (0.02%) level with15 (300) fb−1 of data. We also apply this projected bound to two scenarios with Higgsportal couplings, where the scalar mediator S either couples to a) the SM quarks only, orb) to both quarks and leptons in the minimal flavor violation paradigm. In both scenarioswe compare the reach of our proposed search with the expected constraints from ATLASand CMS on the invisible Higgs width and with the constraints from rare B-decays studiesat LHCb. We find that for 1 GeV < mS < 2 GeV and 0.5 mm . cτ . 10 mm our proposedsearch will be competitive with the ATLAS and CMS projections, while at the same timeproviding crucial information of the hadronic interactions of S, which can not be obtainedfrom the indirect measurement of the Higgs invisible width.
PB Springer
YR 2020
FD 2020
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/21872
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/21872
LA eng
NO Vidal, X.C., Tsai, Y. & Zurita, J. Exclusive displaced hadronic signatures in the LHC forward region. J. High Energ. Phys. 2020, 115 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP01(2020)115
NO The work of XCV is supported by MINECO (Spain) through the Ram´on y Cajal program RYC-2016-20073 and by XuntaGal under the ED431F 2018/01 project. YT is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number PHY-1620074. YT would like to thank Aspen Center for Physics for hospitality during the completion of this work, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant PHY-1607611.
DS Minerva
RD 23 abr 2026