Triggering Soft Bombs at the LHC
Simon Knapen, Simone Pagan Griso, Michele Papucci, Dean J. Robinson

TL;DR
This paper proposes a novel high-level trigger strategy for the LHC to efficiently detect 'soft bomb' events characterized by high multiplicity soft particles, which are difficult to distinguish from pile-up using traditional methods.
Contribution
It introduces a 'belt of fire' trigger concept that enhances detection efficiency of soft bombs by identifying a dense hit band in the tracker, enabling better separation from pile-up events.
Findings
Achieves about 10% trigger efficiency for soft bombs of several hundred GeV.
Demonstrates the feasibility of detecting Higgs-related soft bombs with marginally higher rates than traditional triggers.
Provides a proof-of-concept for a new trigger strategy to identify strongly-coupled hidden valley signatures.
Abstract
Very high multiplicity, spherically-symmetric distributions of soft particles, with ~ few hundred MeV, may be a signature of strongly-coupled hidden valleys that exhibit long, efficient showering windows. With traditional triggers, such "soft bomb" events closely resemble pile-up and are therefore only recorded with minimum bias triggers at a very low efficiency. We demonstrate a proof-of-concept for a high-level triggering strategy that efficiently separates soft bombs from pile-up by searching for a "belt of fire": A high density band of hits on the innermost layer of the tracker. Seeding our proposed high-level trigger with existing jet, missing transverse energy or lepton hardware-level triggers, we show that net trigger efficiencies of order 10% are possible for bombs of mass several hundred GeV. We also consider the special case that soft bombs are the result of an exotic…
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