Searches for long-lived charged particles with the ATLAS experiment

TL;DR

This paper reports on two searches for long-lived charged particles using ATLAS data, employing ionization and time-of-flight measurements, resulting in no significant signals but setting limits on various hypothetical particles.

Contribution

It introduces new search strategies for long-lived charged particles at the LHC using ionization and time-of-flight data, with the first limits on certain supersymmetric particles.

Findings

No evidence for long-lived charged particles was observed.

Limits were set on the masses of long-lived squarks, gluinos, and sleptons.

The analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of ionization and time-of-flight techniques in such searches.

Abstract

These conference proceedings for PLHC 2011 in Perugia, Italy summarize the results from two searches for long-lived charged particles using 34-37 pb-1. The searches are based on direct detection and exploits ionization energy loss and time-of-flight measurements to separate slow-moving signal particles from the Standard Model backgrounds. The observations are in all cases consistent with the background-only hypotheses and limits are presented for long-lived squarks, gluinos and sleptons.