Soft-unclustered-energy patterns from quirks

We propose searching for physics beyond the Standard Model in the low-transverse-momentum tracks accompanying hard-scatter events at the LHC. TeV-scale resonances connected to a dark QCD sector could be enhanced by selecting events with anomalies in the track distributions. As a benchmark, a quirk model with microscopic string lengths is developed, including a setup for event simulation. For this model, strategies are presented to enhance the sensitivity compared to inclusive resonance searches: a simple cut-based selection, a supervised search, and a model-agnostic weakly supervised anomaly search with the CATHODE method. Expected discovery potentials and exclusion limits are shown for <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <a:mrow> <a:mn>140</a:mn> <a:mtext> </a:mtext> <a:mtext> </a:mtext> <a:msup> <a:mi>fb</a:mi> <a:mrow> <a:mo>−</a:mo> <a:mn>1</a:mn> </a:mrow> </a:msup> </a:mrow> </a:math> of 13 TeV proton-proton collisions at the LHC.