Phenomenology of Hidden Valleys at Hadron Colliders

TL;DR

This paper explores the phenomenology of Hidden Valleys, low-mass hidden sector states, and proposes search strategies at the LHC, focusing on high multiplicity events, jet/lepton characteristics, and narrow resonances.

Contribution

It introduces general search techniques for Hidden Valleys at the LHC, emphasizing event features and resonance signatures, extending beyond specific models.

Findings

LHC can effectively detect Hidden Valley signals with proposed cuts.

Hidden Valleys produce high multiplicity, spherical events with distinctive resonance signatures.

Search strategies are broadly applicable to various Hidden Valley models.

Abstract

We study the phenomenology of, and search techniques for, a class of "Hidden Valleys." These models are characterized by low mass (well below a TeV) bound states resulting from a confining gauge interaction in a hidden sector; the states include a spin-one resonance that can decay to lepton pairs. Assuming that the hidden sector communicates to the Standard Model (SM) through TeV suppressed operators, taking into account the constraint from the $Z$ pole physics at LEP, searches at Tevatron may be difficult in the particular class of Hidden Valleys we consider, so that we concentrate on the searches at the LHC. Hidden Valley events are characterized by high multiplicities of jets and leptons in the final state. Depending on the scale of confinement in the hidden sector, the events are typically more spherical, with lower thrust and higher incidences of isolated leptons, than those from the SM background processes. Most notably, high cluster invariant mass and very narrow, low mass resonances in lepton pairs are the key observables to identify the signal. We use these characteristics to develop a set of cuts to separate the Hidden Valley from SM, and show that with these cuts LHC has a significant reach in the parameter space. Our strategies are quite general and should apply well beyond the particular class of models studied here.