Search for Massive Long-lived Highly Ionising Particles with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper reports a search for massive, long-lived, highly ionising particles at the LHC using ATLAS data, setting new limits on their production cross sections across a range of charges and masses.

Contribution

It introduces a novel search method for highly ionising particles using energy loss signatures in ATLAS detectors and provides the first limits in this parameter space.

Findings

No such particles were observed in the data.

Limits on production cross sections range from 1 to 12 pb.

Constraints are set for particles with charges 6e to 17e and masses 200 GeV to 1000 GeV.

Abstract

A search is made for massive long-lived highly ionising particles with the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, using 3.1 pb-1 of pp collision data taken at sqrt(s)=7 TeV. The signature of energy loss in the ATLAS inner detector and electromagnetic calorimeter is used. No such particles are found and limits on the production cross section for electric charges 6e <= |q| <= 17e and masses 200 GeV <= m <= 1000 GeV are set in the range 1-12 pb for different hypotheses on the production mechanism.