Detecting light long-lived particle produced by cosmic ray

Abstract

We investigate the possibility of detecting light long-lived particle (LLP) produced by high energy cosmic ray colliding with atmosphere. The LLP may penetrate the atmosphere and decay into a pair of muons near/in the neutrino telescope. Such muons can be treated as the detectable signal for neutrino telescope. This study is motivated by recent cosmic electron/positron observations which suggest the existence of O(TeV) dark matter and new light O(GeV) particle. It indicates that dark sector may be complicated, and there may exist more than one light particles, for example the dark gauge boson A ′ and associated dark Higgs boson h ′ . In this work, we discuss the scenario with A ′ heavier than h ′ and h ′ is treated as LLP. Based on our numerical estimation, we find that the large volume neutrino telescope IceCube has the capacity to observe several tens of di-muon events per year for favorable parameters if the decay length of LLP can be comparable with the depth of atmosphere. The challenge here is how to suppress the muon backgrounds induced by cosmic rays and atmospheric neutrinos.

Light dark sector searches at low-energy high-luminosity e + e − colliders

“…Finally, we note that new light particles may also be searched for using the cosmic-ray signatures produced in the earth or in the sun [96][97][98][99][100]. By combining results from experiments targeted at the three basic frontiers of particle physics, it will be possible to establish a universal picture of the new physics in the future [101].…”

Meson production in air showers and the search for light exotic particles

“…The direct decay of mesons into mCPs, m → χχ, the Dalitz decays of pseudoscalar mesons, P → χχγ, and the three-particle decay of vector mesons, V → χχP will give the dominant contributions to the mCP production in hadronic interactions. We use for evaluation 7 of the relevant branching ratios the experimental values given by the particle data group [47].…”

“…[4,5] recently pointed out that cosmic rays (CRs) colliding with DM can up-scatter them, leading to a significantly increased DM flux above the threshold energy of direct detection experiments. Another generic source of light DM particles are CR interactions in the atmosphere of the Earth [6][7][8][9][10][11]. If mesons produced in these interactions decay partially into DM, an energetic DM flux that can be detected in underground experiments results.…”

Constraining strongly coupled new physics from cosmic rays with machine learning techniques

“…The remarkable success of these techniques, e.g., in discriminating electroweak scale resonances from QCD-induced backgrounds, makes it plausible that one can apply similar techniques to the study of cosmicray air showers in separating Standard Model processes from decays of heavy resonances or multi-particle phenomena [17,18]. Previous work aimed at setting limits on new physics using cosmic-ray interactions has either predominantly focused on exploiting primary and secondary neutrinos [19][20][21][22], hadronic shower particles [23], or very light resonances [24]. Here, instead, we study whether the detailed interactions of the hard process involving very heavy particles could leave an imprint strong enough to discriminate new physics from Standard Model QCDinduced backgrounds as measured at the Pierre Auger Observatory.…”