R-Hadron and long lived particle searches at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges and solutions for detecting long-lived charged particles at the LHC, focusing on hardware, trigger, and reconstruction methods used by ATLAS and CMS, tested on specific SUSY models.

Contribution

It introduces model-independent approaches for long-lived particle detection at the LHC and compares their implementation in ATLAS and CMS experiments.

Findings

Both experiments suggest time of flight methods for detection.

ATLAS estimates beta at trigger level; CMS uses dE/dx for beta estimation.

Methods are tested on GMSB and Split SUSY benchmarks.

Abstract

If long lived charged particles exist, and produced at the LHC, they may travel with velocity significantly slower than the speed of light. This unique signature was not considered during the design of the LHC experiments, ATLAS and CMS. As a result, hardware and trigger capabilities need to be evaluated. Model independent approaches for finding long lived particles with the LHC experiments are introduced. They are tested using two bench marks, one in GMSB and one in Split SUSY. The focus is on hardware and trigger issues, as well as reconstruction methods developed by ATLAS and CMS. Both experiments suggest time of flight (TOF) based methods. However, the implementation is different. In ATLAS a first beta estimation is done already at the trigger level. CMS also uses dE/dx to estimate beta.