English

Dynamical Dark Matter, MATHUSLA, and the Lifetime Frontier

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2019-01-03 v2

Abstract

MATHUSLA is a proposed surface detector at CERN that would be able to observe the decays of non-hadronic electrically neutral long-lived particles (LLPs) with almost no background or trigger limitations. This would allow MATHUSLA to probe sub-GeV to TeV masses and lifetimes up to cτ107 mc\tau \sim 10^7~{\rm m}. MATHUSLA can play an important role in probing dark-matter scenarios involving extended hidden sectors, where additional dark states often manifest as LLPs. A prime example of such a scenario is furnished by the Dynamical Dark Matter (DDM) framework, which intrinsically gives rise to large ensembles of dark states exhibiting a broad range of masses and lifetimes. In this paper, we examine the extent to which MATHUSLA can probe the DDM parameter space, and we demonstrate that MATHUSLA may be capable of providing direct confirmation of certain unique aspects of the DDM framework which might be difficult to probe in other ways.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1809.11021,
  title  = {Dynamical Dark Matter, MATHUSLA, and the Lifetime Frontier},
  author = {David Curtin and Keith R. Dienes and Brooks Thomas},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.11021},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

11 pages, LaTeX, 2 figures. A preliminary version of some of the results of this paper has been included within the official MATHUSLA white paper arXiv:1806.07396, which summarizes the physics case for the MATHUSLA detector

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:22:01.491Z