Search for Heavy Long-Lived Charged Particles with the ATLAS detector in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

TL;DR

This paper reports a search for long-lived charged particles in proton-proton collisions at 7 TeV using the ATLAS detector, setting new mass exclusion limits for various hypothetical particles.

Contribution

The study provides the first ATLAS search for heavy long-lived charged particles, establishing mass exclusion limits for staus, sleptons, and gluino R-hadrons at 7 TeV.

Findings

No excess above background observed.

Excluded stable staus up to 136 GeV.

Excluded gluino R-hadrons up to 544 GeV.

Abstract

A search for long-lived charged particles reaching the muon spectrometer is performed using a data sample of 37 pb^-1 from pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV collected by the ATLAS detector at the LHC. No excess is observed above the estimated background. Stable stau's are excluded at 95% CL up to a mass of 136 GeV, in GMSB models with N5 = 3, messenger = 250 TeV, sign(mu) = 1 and tan beta = 5. Electroweak production of sleptons is excluded up to a mass of 110 GeV. Gluino R-hadrons in a generic interaction model are excluded up to masses of 530 GeV to 544 GeV depending on the fraction of R-hadrons produced as gluino-balls