Searches for Long-Lived Particles at the Future FCC-ee

TL;DR

The paper explores the potential of FCC-ee, a future electron-positron collider, to discover long-lived particles like heavy neutral leptons, axion-like particles, and exotic Higgs decays, leveraging its high luminosity and clean environment.

Contribution

It identifies and studies three key physics cases for long-lived particles at FCC-ee, proposing optimized experimental strategies for their detection.

Findings

High sensitivity to heavy neutral leptons, axion-like particles, and exotic Higgs decays.

Potential for improved search techniques through out-of-the-box optimization.

Significant discovery opportunities in high-luminosity Z, Higgs, W, and top quark runs.

Abstract

The electron-positron stage of the Future Circular Collider, FCC-ee, is a frontier factory for Higgs, top, electroweak, and flavour physics. It is designed to operate in a 100 km circular tunnel built at CERN, and will serve as the first step towards $\geq$ 100 TeV proton-proton collisions. In addition to an essential and unique Higgs program, it offers powerful opportunities to discover direct or indirect evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model. Direct searches for long-lived particles at FCC-ee could be particularly fertile in the high-luminosity $Z$ run, where $5\times 10^{12}$ $Z$ bosons are anticipated to be produced for the configuration with two interaction points. The high statistics of Higgs bosons, $W$ bosons and top quarks in very clean experimental conditions could offer additional opportunities at other collision energies. Three physics cases producing long-lived signatures at FCC-ee are highlighted and studied in this paper: heavy neutral leptons (HNLs), axion-like particles (ALPs), and exotic decays of the Higgs boson. These searches motivate out-of-the-box optimization of experimental conditions and analysis techniques, that could lead to improvements in other physics searches.