Opening the Third Generation: The Search for Long-Lived Fundamental Particles

Informazioni relative al progetto

OPEN3GEN

ID dell’accordo di sovvenzione: 772357

DOI

10.3030/772357

Progetto chiuso

Data della firma CE 23 Aprile 2018

Data di avvio 1 Marzo 2019

Data di completamento 31 Agosto 2025

Finanziato da

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Costo totale

€ 1 747 286,00

Contributo UE

€ 1 747 286,00

Coordinato da

THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - OPEN3GEN (Opening the Third Generation: The Search for Long-Lived Fundamental Particles)

Periodo di rendicontazione: 2023-09-01 al 2025-02-28

Sintesi del contesto e degli obiettivi generali del progetto

In the quest to find new underlying physics, the OPEN3GEN team identified a substantial gap that we have unique abilities to address. In collider physics, we focus on high mass and energy and generally neglect an additional axis that we can explore: long lifetimes. We know of four fundamental SM particles with relatively long lifetimes: bottom and charm quarks and tau and muon leptons. Are there more long(er) lifetime particles (LLPs) in nature? Are they related by an underlying symmetry? Many models motivate new LLPs in nature. Our experiments currently have little sensitivity to these particles and we optimize our standard reconstruction algorithms to be sensitive only to the SM lifetimes we know of. Recent years have seen some trend towards searching for LLPs (see Figure 1) but they cover small parts of the mass-lifetime phase space. These searches have neglected the most powerful method: to search for decays of LLPs to third generation SM particles. In a large class of feasible models, third generation searches will be more sensitive for one simple reason: particles decay preferentially to the most massive particles available. The tau mass is ~3500 times the electron mass and so massive new states are commensurately more likely to decay into it: third generation particles have a “privileged role”. However, it is experimentally more challenging to search for decays to third generation particles because 1) they themselves decay to more complex signatures and 2) they have larger background processes.We are opening up this new search axis in fundamental physics by searching for decays of LLPs to pairs of tau leptons. Discovery of LLPs would lead us to a new underlying dynamics, which we can discover and establish the nature of.

Lavoro eseguito dall’inizio del progetto fino alla fine del periodo coperto dalla relazione e principali risultati finora ottenuti

The project has proceeded with great progress, even despite the setbacks caused by the Covid19 Pandemic. The major milestones of the project to date are
1) The design of a new trigger to record long-lived particles decaying to tau leptons at the ATLAS detector. This is a trigger to record hadronic decay signatures, and simulation shows that this increases the sensitivity to this class of particle by a factor of over two in large lifetime regions.
2) The newly designed trigger was implemented in the trigger menu, meaning that it will be used to record data during the LHC run starting in spring 2022.
3) The hadronic tau identification has been redesigned to be sensitive to long-lived particles decaying to taus. In particular the inclusion of a zero-prong category of taus has more than doubled this sensitivity. In addition to this, the retuning of the recurrent neural network used to identify taus has augmented the sensitivity in the case where charged particles are reconstructed.
4) The analysis framework to search the LHC run 2 data is now advanced, with backgrounds accounted for, and the framework is in place for run 3.
The team has achieved the above aspects of the action with great dedication and productivity throughout the lockdowns.

Progressi oltre lo stato dell’arte e potenziale impatto previsto (incluso l’impatto socioeconomico e le implicazioni sociali più ampie del progetto fino ad ora)

Novel neural networks trained to provide sensitivity to record (trigger on) particles decaying from long-lived particles.
Novel neural networks trained to provide sensitivity to identify particles decaying from long-lived particles.
Results are expected on new phase space, first in Run 2 ATLAS data and then in the new Run 3 data, which will open up the new searches more strongly as our new triggers will be recording data.