Annihilation decays of bound states at the LHC

Understand

At the Large Hadron Collider, heavy particles may be produced in pairs close to their kinematic threshold.

• If these particles have strong enough attractive interactions they may form bound states.
• Consequently, the bound states may decay through annihilation back into the standard model.
• Such annihilation decays have the potential to provide much information about the bound particles, such as their mass, spin, or charges, in a manner completely complementary to standard single particle cascade decays.