Macroscopic strings and \quirks" at colliders

By Junhai Kang, M. Luty. 2008

170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We consider extensions of the standard model containing additional heavy particles (``quirks'') charged under a new unbroken non-abelian gauge group as well as the standard model. We assume that the quirk mass m is in the phenomenologically interesting range 100 GeV–TeV, and that the new gauge group gets strong at a scale Λ < m. In this case breaking of strings is exponentially suppressed, and quirk production results in strings that are long compared to Λ−1. The existence of these long stable strings leads to highly exotic events at colliders. For 100 eV Λ keV the strings are macroscopic, giving rise to events with two separated quirk tracks with measurable curvature toward each other due to the string interaction. For keV Λ MeV the typical strings are mesoscopic: too small to resolve in the detector, but large compared to atomic scales. In this case, the bound state appears as a single particle, but its mass is the invariant mass of a quirk pair, which has an event-by-event distribution. For MeV Λ m, the strings are microscopic, and the quirks annihilate promptly within the detector. For colored quirks, this can lead to hadronic fireball events with ~ 103 hadrons with energy of order GeV emitted in conjunction with hard decay products from the final annihilation.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3a77f9d8edb173c55d969e0e02461fa47179ccc

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Citations in the corpus

Vectorlike confinement at the LHC (2009, unknown): “3 sundrum@pha.jhu.edu Contents”
Higgs Physics at the HL-LHC and HE-LHC (2019, background): “The presence of long-lived particles (LLP) can be a striking feature of many new physics models [802, 803, 804, 805, 806, 807, 808, 809, 810, 811, 812, 813].”
SIMP spectroscopy (2015, background): “The number of states that are stable to strong decays grows as dark quark masses grow and the theory transitions into a quirk-like regime [50].”
Non-Abelian dark matter and dark radiation (2015, background): “1 New visible particles charged under a new non-Abelian gauge group with macroscopic sized confinement scale have been proposed in the past under the name of theta-particles [8–10] and more recently as quirks [11].”
Searching for long-lived particles beyond the Standard Model at the Large Hadron Collider (2019, background): “Quirks are particles charged under both the SM and a new confining gauge group [175], referred to here as “infracolor” (IC).”