On the challenges of searching for GeV-scale long-lived particles at the LHC

Understand

Many models of dark matter predict long-lived particles (LLPs) that can give rise to striking signatures at the LHC.

• Existing searches for displaced vertices are however tailored towards heavy LLPs.
• In this work we show that this bias severely affects their sensitivity to LLPs with masses at the GeV scale.
• To illustrate this point we consider two dark sector models with light LLPs that decay hadronically: a strongly-interacting dark sector with long-lived exotic mesons, and a Higgsed dark sector with a long-lived dark Higgs boson.