Muon Excess in Cosmic Rays and at CDF: Signs for a Hidden Sector?

TL;DR

This paper proposes Hidden Valley models near a conformal fixed point to explain excess muon events in cosmic rays and collider data, suggesting new physics in a hidden sector detectable at the LHC.

Contribution

It introduces a class of Hidden Valley models that can simultaneously account for cosmic ray and collider muon excesses, linking astrophysical and collider anomalies.

Findings

Models explain cosmic ray muon excesses with high multiplicity.

Models partially account for CDF multi-muon event excess.

Predicted signatures could be observed at the LHC.

Abstract

In this letter we discuss a certain class of Hidden Valley models where the dynamics in the hidden sector are close to a strongly coupled conformal fixed point. We show that these models can explain the excess in cosmic ray muon events with high muon multiplicities that has been reported from cosmic ray studies with the ALEPH and DELPHI detectors. We further point out that these models can also at least partially account for the excess in multi-muon events that was found by the CDF experiment. Finally we discuss possible signatures of these models at the LHC.