Searches for Atmospheric Long-Lived Particles

Understand

Long-lived particles are predicted in extensions of the Standard Model that involve relatively light but very weakly interacting sectors.

• In this paper we consider the possibility that some of these particles are produced in atmospheric cosmic ray showers, and their decay intercepted by neutrino detectors such as IceCube or Super-Kamiokande.
• We present the methodology and evaluate the sensitivity of these searches in various scenarios, including extensions with heavy neutral leptons in models of massive neutrinos, models with an extra $U(1)$ gauge symmetry, and a combination of both in a $U(1)_{B-L}$ model.
• Our results are shown as a function of the production rate and the lifetime of the corresponding long-lived particles.