arXiv subjects

Sebastian Trojanowski

Publications and source records attributed to Sebastian Trojanowski.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Extending the reach of FASER, MATHUSLA, and SHiP towards smaller lifetimes using secondary particle production

Many existing or proposed intensity-frontier search experiments look for decay signatures of light long-lived particles (LLPs), highly displaced from the interaction point, in a distant detector that is well-shielded from SM background. This approach is, however, limited to new particles with decay lengths similar to or larger than the baseline of those experiments. In this study, we discuss how this basic constraint can be overcome in BSM models that go beyond the simplest scenarios. If more than one light new particle is present in the model, an additional secondary production of LLPs may take place right in front of the detector, opening this way a new lifetime regime to be probed. We illustrate the prospects of such searches in the future experiments FASER, MATHUSLA and SHiP, for representative models, emphasizing possible connections to dark matter or an anomalous magnetic moment of muon. We also analyze additional advantages from employing dedicated neutrino detectors placed in front of the main decay volume.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2020

Dark matter relic density from conformally or disformally coupled light scalars

Thermal freeze-out is a prominent example of dark matter (DM) production mechanism in the early Universe that can yield the correct relic density of stable weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). At the other end of the mass scale, many popular extensions of the Standard Model predict the existence of ultra-light scalar fields. These can be coupled to matter, preferentially in a universal and shift-symmetry-preserving way. We study the impact of such conformal and disformal couplings on the relic density of WIMPs, without introducing modifications to the thermal history of the Universe. This can either result in an additional thermal contribution to the DM relic density or suppress otherwise too large abundances compared to the observed levels. In this work, we assume that the WIMPs only interact with the standard model via the light scalar portal. We use simple models of fermionic or scalar DM, although a similar discussion holds for more sophisticated scenarios, and predict that their masses should be between $\sim 100~\textrm{GeV}$ and several $\textrm{TeV}$ to comply both with the DM abundance and current bounds on the couplings of the light scalars to matter at the LHC. Future searches will tighten these bounds.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2020

Detecting and Studying High-Energy Collider Neutrinos with FASER at the LHC

Neutrinos are copiously produced at particle colliders, but no collider neutrino has ever been detected. Colliders, and particularly hadron colliders, produce both neutrinos and anti-neutrinos of all flavors at very high energies, and they are therefore highly complementary to those from other sources. FASER, the recently approved Forward Search Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, is ideally located to provide the first detection and study of collider neutrinos. We investigate the prospects for neutrino studies of a proposed component of FASER, FASER$ν$, a 25cm x 25cm x 1.35m emulsion detector to be placed directly in front of the FASER spectrometer in tunnel TI12. FASER$ν$ consists of 1000 layers of emulsion films interleaved with 1-mm-thick tungsten plates, with a total tungsten target mass of 1.2 tons. We estimate the neutrino fluxes and interaction rates at FASER$ν$, describe the FASER$ν$ detector, and analyze the characteristics of the signals and primary backgrounds. For an integrated luminosity of 150 fb$^{-1}$ to be collected during Run 3 of the 14 TeV Large Hadron Collider from 2021-23, and assuming standard model cross sections, approximately 1300 electron neutrinos, 20,000 muon neutrinos, and 20 tau neutrinos will interact in FASER$ν$, with mean energies of 600 GeV to 1 TeV, depending on the flavor. With such rates and energies, FASER will measure neutrino cross sections at energies where they are currently unconstrained, will bound models of forward particle production, and could open a new window on physics beyond the standard model.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2020

Technical Proposal: FASERnu

FASERnu is a proposed small and inexpensive emulsion detector designed to detect collider neutrinos for the first time and study their properties. FASERnu will be located directly in front of FASER, 480 m from the ATLAS interaction point along the beam collision axis in the unused service tunnel TI12. From 2021-23 during Run 3 of the 14 TeV LHC, roughly 1,300 electron neutrinos, 20,000 muon neutrinos, and 20 tau neutrinos will interact in FASERnu with TeV-scale energies. With the ability to observe these interactions, reconstruct their energies, and distinguish flavors, FASERnu will probe the production, propagation, and interactions of neutrinos at the highest human-made energies ever recorded. The FASERnu detector will be composed of 1000 emulsion layers interleaved with tungsten plates. The total volume of the emulsion and tungsten is 25cm x 25cm x 1.35m, and the tungsten target mass is 1.2 tonnes. From 2021-23, 7 sets of emulsion layers will be installed, with replacement roughly every 20-50 1/fb in planned Technical Stops. In this document, we summarize FASERnu's physics goals and discuss the estimates of neutrino flux and interaction rates. We then describe the FASERnu detector in detail, including plans for assembly, transport, installation, and emulsion replacement, and procedures for emulsion readout and analyzing the data. We close with cost estimates for the detector components and infrastructure work and a timeline for the experiment.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2019

Testing dark matter with Cherenkov light -- prospects of H.E.S.S. and CTA for exploring minimal supersymmetry

We provide an updated and improved study of the prospects of the H.E.S.S. and Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) experiments in testing neutralino dark matter in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model with nine free parameters (p9MSSM). We include all relevant experimental constraints and theoretical developments, in particular the calculation of the Sommerfeld enhancement for both present-day annihilation and the relic abundance. We perform a state-of-the-art analysis of the CTA sensitivity with a log-likelihood test ratio statistics and apply it to a numerical scan of the p9MSSM parameter space focusing on a TeV scale dark matter. We find that, assuming Einasto profile of dark matter halo in the Milky Way, H.E.S.S. has already been able to nearly reach the so-called thermal WIMP value, while CTA will go below it by providing a further improvement of at least an order of magnitude. Both H.E.S.S. and CTA are sensitive to several cases for which direct detection cross section will be below the so-called neutrino floor, with H.E.S.S. being sensitive to most of the wino region, while CTA also covering a large fraction of the ~1 TeV higgsino region. We show that CTA sensitivity will be further improved in the monochromatic photon search mode for both single-component and underabundant dark matter.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2019

FASER's Physics Reach for Long-Lived Particles

FASER,the ForwArd Search ExpeRiment,is a proposed experiment dedicated to searching for light, extremely weakly-interacting particles at the LHC. Such particles may be produced in the LHC's high-energy collisions and travel long distances through concrete and rock without interacting. They may then decay to visible particles in FASER, which is placed 480 m downstream of the ATLAS interaction point. In this work we briefly describe the FASER detector layout and the status of potential backgrounds. We then present the sensitivity reach for FASER for a large number of long-lived particle models, updating previous results to a uniform set of detector assumptions, and analyzing new models. In particular, we consider all of the renormalizable portal interactions, leading to dark photons, dark Higgs bosons, and heavy neutral leptons (HNLs); light B-L and $L_i - L_j$ gauge bosons; axion-like particles (ALPs) that are coupled dominantly to photons, fermions, and gluons through non-renormalizable operators; and pseudoscalars with Yukawa-like couplings. We find that FASER and its follow-up, FASER 2, have a full physics program, with discovery sensitivity in all of these models and potentially far-reaching implications for particle physics and cosmology.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2019

FASER: ForwArd Search ExpeRiment at the LHC

FASER, the ForwArd Search ExpeRiment, is a proposed experiment dedicated to searching for light, extremely weakly-interacting particles at the LHC. Such particles may be produced in the LHC's high-energy collisions in large numbers in the far-forward region and then travel long distances through concrete and rock without interacting. They may then decay to visible particles in FASER, which is placed 480 m downstream of the ATLAS interaction point. In this work, we describe the FASER program. In its first stage, FASER is an extremely compact and inexpensive detector, sensitive to decays in a cylindrical region of radius R = 10 cm and length L = 1.5 m. FASER is planned to be constructed and installed in Long Shutdown 2 and will collect data during Run 3 of the 14 TeV LHC from 2021-23. If FASER is successful, FASER 2, a much larger successor with roughly R ~ 1 m and L ~ 5 m, could be constructed in Long Shutdown 3 and collect data during the HL-LHC era from 2026-35. FASER and FASER 2 have the potential to discover dark photons, dark Higgs bosons, heavy neutral leptons, axion-like particles, and many other long-lived particles, as well as provide new information about neutrinos, with potentially far-ranging implications for particle physics and cosmology. We describe the current status, anticipated challenges, and discovery prospects of the FASER program.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2018

Technical Proposal for FASER: ForwArd Search ExpeRiment at the LHC

FASER is a proposed small and inexpensive experiment designed to search for light, weakly-interacting particles during Run 3 of the LHC from 2021-23. Such particles may be produced in large numbers along the beam collision axis, travel for hundreds of meters without interacting, and then decay to standard model particles. To search for such events, FASER will be located 480 m downstream of the ATLAS IP in the unused service tunnel TI12 and be sensitive to particles that decay in a cylindrical volume with radius R=10 cm and length L=1.5 m. FASER will complement the LHC's existing physics program, extending its discovery potential to a host of new, light particles, with potentially far-reaching implications for particle physics and cosmology. This document describes the technical details of the FASER detector components: the magnets, the tracker, the scintillator system, and the calorimeter, as well as the trigger and readout system. The preparatory work that is needed to install and operate the detector, including civil engineering, transport, and integration with various services is also presented. The information presented includes preliminary cost estimates for the detector components and the infrastructure work, as well as a timeline for the design, construction, and installation of the experiment.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2018

Letter of Intent for FASER: ForwArd Search ExpeRiment at the LHC

FASER is a proposed small and inexpensive experiment designed to search for light, weakly-interacting particles at the LHC. Such particles are dominantly produced along the beam collision axis and may be long-lived, traveling hundreds of meters before decaying. To exploit both of these properties, FASER is to be located along the beam collision axis, 480 m downstream from the ATLAS interaction point, in the unused service tunnel TI18. We propose that FASER be installed in TI18 in Long Shutdown 2 in time to collect data from 2021-23 during Run 3 of the 14 TeV LHC. FASER will detect new particles that decay within a cylindrical volume with radius R= 10 cm and length L = 1.5 m. With these small dimensions, FASER will complement the LHC's existing physics program, extending its discovery potential to a host of new particles, including dark photons, axion-like particles, and other CP-odd scalars. A FLUKA simulation and analytical estimates have confirmed that numerous potential backgrounds are highly suppressed at the FASER location, and the first in situ measurements are currently underway. We describe FASER's location and discovery potential, its target signals and backgrounds, the detector's layout and components, and the experiment's preliminary cost estimate, funding, and timeline.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2018

FASER: ForwArd Search ExpeRiment at the LHC

New physics has traditionally been expected in the high-$p_T$ region at high-energy collider experiments. If new particles are light and weakly-coupled, however, this focus may be completely misguided: light particles are typically highly concentrated within a few mrad of the beam line, allowing sensitive searches with small detectors, and even extremely weakly-coupled particles may be produced in large numbers there. We propose a new experiment, ForwArd Search ExpeRiment, or FASER, which would be placed downstream of the ATLAS or CMS interaction point (IP) in the very forward region and operated concurrently there. Two representative on-axis locations are studied: a far location, $400~\text{m}$ from the IP and just off the beam tunnel, and a near location, just $150~\text{m}$ from the IP and right behind the TAN neutral particle absorber. For each location, we examine leading neutrino- and beam-induced backgrounds. As a concrete example of light, weakly-coupled particles, we consider dark photons produced through light meson decay and proton bremsstrahlung. We find that even a relatively small and inexpensive cylindrical detector, with a radius of $\sim 10~\text{cm}$ and length of $5-10~\text{m}$, depending on the location, can discover dark photons in a large and unprobed region of parameter space with dark photon mass $m_{A'} \sim 10~\text{MeV} - 1~\text{GeV}$ and kinetic mixing parameter $ε\sim 10^{-7} - 10^{-3}$. FASER will clearly also be sensitive to many other forms of new physics. We conclude with a discussion of topics for further study that will be essential for understanding FASER's feasibility, optimizing its design, and realizing its discovery potential.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2018

WIMP dark matter candidates and searches - current status and future prospects

We review several current aspects of dark matter theory and experiment. We overview the present experimental status, which includes current bounds and recent claims and hints of a possible signal in a wide range of experiments: direct detection in underground laboratories, gamma-ray, cosmic ray, X-ray, neutrino telescopes, and the LHC. We briefly review several possible particle candidates for a Weakly Interactive Massive Particle (WIMP) and dark matter that have recently been considered in the literature. We pay particular attention to the lightest neutralino of supersymmetry as it remains the best motivated candidate for dark matter and also shows excellent detection prospects. Finally we briefly review some alternative scenarios that can considerably alter properties and prospects for the detection of dark matter obtained within the standard thermal WIMP paradigm.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2018

Heavy Neutral Leptons at FASER

We study the prospects for discovering heavy neutral leptons at ForwArd Search ExpeRiment (FASER), the newly proposed detector at the LHC. Previous studies showed that a relatively small detector with ~10 m length and ~1 m cross sectional area can probe large unconstrained parts of parameter space for dark photons and dark Higgs bosons. In this work we show that FASER will also be sensitive to heavy neutral leptons that have mixing angles with the active neutrinos that are up to an order of magnitude lower than current bounds. In particular, this is true for heavy neutral leptons produced dominantly in $B$-meson decays, in which case FASER's discovery potential is comparable to the proposed SHiP detector. We also illustrate how the search for heavy neutral leptons at FASER will be complementary to ongoing searches in high-$p_T$ experiments at the LHC and can shed light on the nature of dark matter and the process of baryogenesis in the early Universe.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2018

Dark Higgs Bosons at FASER

FASER, ForwArd Search ExpeRiment at the LHC, has been proposed as a small, very far forward detector to discover new, light, weakly-coupled particles. Previous work showed that with a total volume of just $\sim 0.1 - 1~\rm{m}^3$, FASER can discover dark photons in a large swath of currently unconstrained parameter space, extending the discovery reach of the LHC program. Here we explore FASER's discovery prospects for dark Higgs bosons. These scalar particles are an interesting foil for dark photons, as they probe a different renormalizable portal interaction and are produced dominantly through $B$ and $K$ meson decays, rather than pion decays, leading to less collimated signals. Nevertheless, we find that FASER is also a highly sensitive probe of dark Higgs bosons with significant discovery prospects that are comparable to, and complementary to, much larger proposed experiments.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2018

The Flavor of Cosmology

We discuss the cosmology of models in which the standard model Yukawa couplings depend on scalar field(s), often referred to as flavons. We find that thermal corrections of the flavon potential tend to decrease the Yukawa couplings, providing an important input to model-building. Working in the specific framework of Froggatt-Nielsen models, we compute the abundance of flavons in the early universe generated both via freeze-in and from coherent oscillations induced by thermal corrections to their potential, and discuss constraints on flavon models from cosmology. We find that cosmology places important constraints on theories containing flavons even for regions of parameter space inaccessible to collider searches.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2017

Towards understanding thermal history of the Universe through direct and indirect detection of dark matter

We examine the question to what extent prospective detection of dark matter by direct and indirect- detection experiments could shed light on what fraction of dark matter was generated thermally via the freeze-out process in the early Universe. By simulating putative signals that could be seen in the near future and using them to reconstruct WIMP dark matter properties, we show that, in a model- independent approach this could only be achieved in a thin sliver of the parameter space. However, with additional theoretical input the hypothesis about the thermal freeze-out as the dominant mechanism for generating dark matter can potentially be verified. We illustrate this with two examples: an effective field theory of dark matter with a vector messenger and a higgsino or wino dark matter within the MSSM.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2017

Muon g-2 and related phenomenology in constrained vector-like extensions of the MSSM

We analyze two minimal supersymmetric constrained models with low-energy vector-like matter preserving gauge coupling unification. In one we add to the MSSM spectrum a pair of 5-plets of SU(5), in the other a pair of 10-plets. We show that the muon g-2 anomaly can be explained in these models while retaining perturbativity up to the unification scale, satisfying electroweak and flavor precision tests and current LHC data. We examine also some related phenomenological features of the models, including Higgs mass, fine-tuning, dark matter and several LHC signatures. We stress that, at least for the 5-plet model, the parameter space consistent with g-2 is entirely in reach of the LHC with a moderate increase in luminosity with respect the current data set.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2016

Reconstructing WIMP properties through an interplay of signal measurements in direct detection, Fermi-LAT, and CTA searches for dark matter

We examine the projected ability to reconstruct the mass, scattering, and annihilation cross section of dark matter in the new generation of large underground detectors, XENON-1T, SuperCDMS, and DarkSide-G2, in combination with diffuse gamma radiation from expected 15 years of data from Fermi-LAT observation of 46 local spiral dwarf galaxies and projected CTA sensitivity to a signal from the Galactic Center. To this end we consider several benchmark points spanning a wide range of WIMP mass, different annihilation final states, and large enough event rates to warrant detection in one or more experiments. As previously shown, below some 100 GeV only direct detection experiments will in principle be able to reconstruct the WIMP mass well. This may, in case a signal at Fermi-LAT is also detected, additionally help restricting σv and the allowed decay branching rates. In the intermediate range between some 100 GeV and up a few hundred GeV, direct and indirect detection experiments can be used in complementarity to ameliorate the respective determinations, which in individual experiments can at best be rather poor, thus making the WIMP reconstruction in this mass range very challenging. At large WIMP mass, ~1 TeV, CTA will have the ability to reconstruct mass, annihilation cross section, and the allowed decay branching rates to very good precision for the $τ^+τ^-$ or purely leptonic final state, good for the $W^+W^-$ case, and rather poor for $b\bar{b}$. A substantial improvement can potentially be achieved by reducing the systematic uncertainties, increasing exposure, or by an additional measurement at Fermi-LAT that would help reconstruct the annihilation cross section and the allowed branching fractions to different final states.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2015

Axino dark matter with low reheating temperature

We examine axino dark matter in the regime of a low reheating temperature T_R after inflation and taking into account that reheating is a non-instantaneous process. This can have a significant effect on the dark matter abundance, mainly due to entropy production in inflaton decays. We study both thermal and non-thermal production of axinos in the context of the MSSM with ten free parameters. We identify the ranges of the axino mass and the reheating temperature allowed by the LHC and other particle physics data in different models of axino interactions. We confront these limits with cosmological constraints coming the observed dark matter density, large structures formation and big bang nucleosynthesis. We find a number of differences in the phenomenologically acceptable values of the axino mass and the reheating temperature relative to previous studies. In particular, an upper bound on the axino mass becomes dependent on T_R, reaching a maximum value at T_R~10^2 GeV. If the lightest ordinary supersymmetric particle is a wino or a higgsino, we obtain lower a limit of approximately 10 GeV for the reheating temperature. We demonstrate also that entropy production during reheating affects the maximum allowed axino mass and lowest values of the reheating temperature.

hep-ph↗