Long-lived Staus from Cosmic Rays

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential detection of long-lived staus produced by cosmic ray interactions in the atmosphere, which could be observed as parallel muon-like tracks in neutrino telescopes like IceCube.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of how long-lived staus could be produced by cosmic rays and detectable via their distinctive parallel track signature in neutrino detectors.

Findings

Long-lived staus can produce observable signals in IceCube from high zenith angles.

Background muon pairs are unlikely to mimic the signal at large zenith angles.

Detection of such events could indicate new physics beyond the Standard Model.

Abstract

The collision of a high energy cosmic ray with a nucleon in the upper atmosphere could produce long-lived heavy particles. Such particles would be very penetrating, since the energy loss in matter scales as the inverse mass, and could reach a neutrino telescope like IceCube from large zenith angles. Here we study this possibility and focus on the long-lived stau of SUSY models with a gravitino LSP. The signal would be a pair of muon-like parallel tracks separated by 50 meters along the detector. We evaluate the background of muon pairs and show that any events from zenith angles above 80 degrees could be explained by the production of these heavy particles by cosmic rays.