A Pure-Glue Hidden Valley I. States and Decays

TL;DR

This paper explores a hidden sector coupled to the standard model via new particles, focusing on pure Yang-Mills dynamics that produce metastable glueballs decaying into standard model particles, with implications for collider signals.

Contribution

It provides formulas for the lifetimes and branching ratios of hidden glueballs, detailing their decay channels and potential experimental signatures.

Findings

Hidden glueballs decay mainly into two SM gauge bosons or via radiative photon emissions.

Decay lifetimes and branching ratios are quantitatively characterized.

Signals include jet-rich and photon-rich events at colliders.

Abstract

It is possible that the standard model is coupled, through new massive charged or colored particles, to a hidden sector whose low energy dynamics is controlled by a pure Yang-Mills theory, with no light matter. Such a sector would have numerous metastable "hidden glueballs" built from the hidden gluons. These states would decay to particles of the standard model. We consider the phenomenology of this scenario, and find formulas for the lifetimes and branching ratios of the most important of these states. The dominant decays are to two standard model gauge bosons, or by radiative decays with photon emission, leading to jet- and photon-rich signals.