LAYCAST: LAYered CAvern Surface Tracker at future electron-positron colliders

TL;DR

LAYCAST is a proposed layered surface detector for future electron-positron colliders, designed to enhance sensitivity to various long-lived particles by extending the main detector's reach and suppressing background noise.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel layered surface detector concept, LAYCAST, tailored for future colliders to improve detection of long-lived particles beyond current capabilities.

Findings

LAYCAST significantly extends sensitivity to LLPs compared to current bounds.

Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate effective background suppression.

The detector can probe new parameter space for LLPs at future colliders.

Abstract

We propose a detector concept, LAYered CAvern Surface Tracker (LAYCAST), to be installed on the ceiling and the wall of the cavern hosting the main experiment of future electron-positron colliders such as CEPC and FCC-ee. With detailed and realistic considerations of the design of such a new experiment, the proposed detector is dedicated to extending the sensitivity reach of the main detector to various theoretical scenarios of long-lived particles (LLPs). We study carefully four such scenarios involving a light scalar boson $X$, the heavy neutral lepton $N$, the lightest neutralino $\tilde{\chi}^0_1$ in the R-parity-violating supersymmetry, and the axion-like particle $a$. Long-lived light scalar bosons are considered to be produced from the Standard-Model (SM) Higgs boson's decay ($h \to X X$) at the center-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s} =$ 240 GeV, while the other three types of LLPs are produced either from $Z$-boson decays (viz. $Z \to \nu\, N, ~\tilde{\chi}^0_1\, \tilde{\chi}^0_1 $) or direct scattering process ($ e^- e^+ \to ~\gamma\, a$) at $\sqrt{s} =$ 91.2 GeV, where $\gamma$ and $\nu$ denote the SM photon and neutrino, respectively. With Monte-Carlo simulations, we derive the sensitivities of the proposed experiment to these LLPs and the corresponding signal-event numbers. We also provide a dedicated estimate of a potentially important SM background from long-lived neutral kaons in hadronic $Z$ decays, and show that it is strongly suppressed by the combined requirements of the main detector and LAYCAST. Our findings show that LAYCAST can probe large new parameter space beyond both current bounds and the expected reach of the main experiments at CEPC and FCC-ee. Comparison with existing works in similar directions is also made.