LHC lifetime frontier and visible decay searches in composite asymmetric dark matter models

Abstract

© 2022, The Author(s).The LHC lifetime frontier will probe dark sector in near future, and the visible decay searches at fixed-target experiments have been exploring dark sector. Composite asymmetric dark matter with dark photon portal is a promising framework explaining the coincidence problem between dark matter and visible matter. Dark strong dynamics provides rich structure in the dark sector: the lightest dark nucleon is the dark matter, while strong annihilation into dark pions depletes the symmetric components of the dark matter. Dark photons alleviate cosmological problems. Meanwhile, dark photons make dark hadrons long-lived in terrestrial experiments. Moreover, the dark hadrons are produced through the very same dark photon. In this study, we discuss the visible decay searches for composite asymmetric dark matter models. For a few GeV dark nucleons, the LHC lifetime frontier, MATHUSLA and FASER, has a potential to discover their decay when kinetic mixing angle of dark photon is ϵ ≳ 10−4. On the other hand, fixed-target experiments, in particular SeaQuest, will have a great sensitivity to dark pions with a mass below GeV and with kinetic mixing ϵ ≳ 10−4 in addition to the LHC lifetime frontier. These projected sensitivities to dark hadrons in dark photon parameter space are comparable with the future sensitivities of dark photon searches, such as Belle-II and LHCb.