Constraining long-lived particles from Higgs boson decays at the LHC with displaced vertices and jets

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how a recent ATLAS search for displaced vertices and jets can effectively constrain long-lived particles from Higgs decays, especially for decay lengths of 1-100 mm, providing complementary bounds to other searches.

Contribution

It recasts an ATLAS displaced vertices plus jets search to set bounds on Higgs-originating long-lived particles with specific decay lengths, expanding the experimental sensitivity.

Findings

The search constrains LLP proper decay lengths of about 1-100 mm.

It provides bounds on LLP models that are complementary to other searches.

The recast approach enhances the sensitivity to hadronically or semi-leptonically decaying LLPs.

Abstract

Long-lived particles (LLPs) originating from decays of the Standard-Model or Beyond-the-Standard-Model Higgs bosons are often featured with signatures of displaced vertices (DVs) and jets at colliders. In this work, we show that a recent ATLAS search for DVs plus jets, with its recast implementation, can efficiently place bounds on such hadronically or semi-leptonically decaying LLPs. In particular, we find the search is uniquely sensitive to LLP proper decay lengths of about 1-100 mm, probing complementary regions in the parameter space of the relevant models compared to other prompt and LLP searches.