Minicharged Particles at Accelerators: Progress and Prospects

TL;DR

This paper reviews the theoretical background, current constraints, and future prospects for detecting minicharged particles at accelerators, highlighting unexplored parameter space and recent experimental developments.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of models, constraints, and experimental strategies for searching for minicharged particles at current and future accelerators.

Findings

Significant unexplored parameter space remains at the LHC.

Recent experimental searches are gaining renewed interest.

Minicharged particles could explain the EDGES 21 cm anomaly.

Abstract

Minicharged particles (mCPs), hypothetical free particles with effective electric charges much smaller than the elementary charge, $e$, offer a valuable probe of dark sectors and fundamental physics through several clear experimental signatures. Various models of physics beyond the Standard Model predict such particles, the existence of which could help elucidate the ongoing mysteries regarding electric charge quantization and the nature of dark matter. Moreover, a hypothetical scenario involving a small minicharged subcomponent of dark matter has recently been demonstrated as a viable explanation of the anomaly in the 21 cm hydrogen absorption signal reported by the EDGES collaboration. Although several decades of indirect observations and direct experimental searches for mCPs at particle accelerators have led to severe constraints, a substantial window of the mCP mass$\unicode{x2013}$mixing parameter space remains unexplored at the energy frontier accessible to current state-of-the-art accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Consequently, mCPs have remained topical over the years, and new experimental searches at accelerators have been gaining interest. In this article, we review the theoretical frameworks in which mCPs emerge and their phenomenological implications, the current direct and indirect constraints on mCPs, and the present state of the ongoing and upcoming searches for mCPs at particle accelerators.