Possible Effects of a Hidden Valley on Supersymmetric Phenomenology

TL;DR

A hidden valley sector can significantly alter supersymmetric signals at colliders by reducing missing energy, creating displaced vertices, and producing soft particles, thus complicating detection strategies at the LHC and Tevatron.

Contribution

This paper explores how a hidden valley sector affects supersymmetric phenomenology, highlighting new signatures like displaced vertices and variable neutral particle multiplicity.

Findings

Hidden valley sectors can obscure supersymmetry signals in collider experiments.

Displaced vertices and soft jets/leptons are key signatures of hidden valley effects.

Detection strategies must account for these altered phenomenological features.

Abstract

A hidden valley sector may havea profound impact on the classic phenomenology of supersymmetry. This occurs if the LSP lies in the valley sector. In addition to reducing the standard missing energy signals and possibly providing displaced vertices (phenomena familiar from gauge-mediated and R-parity-violating models) it may lead to a variable multiplicity of new neutral particles, whose decays produce soft jets and/or leptons, and perhaps additional displaced vertices. Combined, these issues might obscure supersymmetric particle production from search strategies used on current Tevatron data and planned for the LHC. The same concerns arise more generally for any model that has a symmetry (such as T-parity or KK-parity) realized nontrivially in both the standard-model and the hidden-valley sectors. Possible strategies for experimental detection are discussed, and the potential importance of the LHCb detector is noted.