Identifying Exclusive Displaced Hadronic Signatures in the Forward Region of the LHC
Xabier Cid Vidal, Yuhsin Tsai, Jose Zurita
The LHCb detector provides accurate vertex reconstruction and hadronic particle identification, which make the experiment an ideal place to look for light long-lived particles (LLP) decaying into Standard Model (SM) hadrons. In contrast with the typical search strategy relying on energetic jets and a high multiplicity of tracks from the LLP decay, LHCb can identify LLPs in exclusive, specific hadronic final states. ...we study the sensitivity of LHCb to an exotic Higgs decay h→SS, followed by the displaced decay of GeV-scale scalars into charged kaons S→K+K−. ... the reconstruction of kaon vertices in narrow invariant mass windows can efficiently eliminate the combinatorial backgrounds from B-meson decays. While the same signal is extremely difficult to probe in the existing displaced jet searches at ATLAS/CMS, the LHCb search we propose can probe the branching ratio BR(h→SS) down to 0.1% (0.02%) level with 15 (300) fb−1 of data. We also apply this projected bound to two scenarios with Higgs portal couplings, where the scalar mediator S either couples to a) the SM quarks only, or b) to both quarks and leptons in the minimal flavor violation paradigm. In both scenarios we compare the reach of our proposed search with the expected constraints from ATLAS and CMS on the invisible Higgs width and with the constraints from rare B-decays studies at LHCb. We find that for 1 GeV <mS< 2 GeV and 0.5 mm≲cτ≲10 mm our proposed search will be competitive with the ATLAS and CMS projections, …..