English

Long-Lived Dark Hadrons at the Electron-Ion Collider

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-07-17 v1 High Energy Physics - Experiment Nuclear Experiment

Abstract

We study a dark non-Abelian gauge sector with GeV-scale confinement. The dark sector is assumed to couple only feebly to the Standard Model, while its low-energy spectrum may contain long-lived flavor-diagonal dark pions. Signals of these states are particularly well suited to the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), where the absence of a hard trigger requirement and the capability to record soft final-state particles offer a complementary probe of dark hadronization dynamics. We present a benchmark portal construction, discuss the mixing between an axion-like mediator and dark pions, and identify the resulting displaced-decay signature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.16400,
  title  = {Long-Lived Dark Hadrons at the Electron-Ion Collider},
  author = {Hooman Davoudiasl and Hongkai Liu and Ethan T. Neil},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.16400},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

6 pages, 3 figures