Probing gluons-enriched dark jets from Higgs boson exotic decays at the LHC

A bstract The dark sector may possess a rich structure yet to be uncovered, and a QCD-like dark sector with GeV-scale dark hadrons can yield novel signatures at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In this work, we focus on a light singlet pseudoscalar mediator that connects the QCD-like dark sector to the Standard Model (SM) sector via the Higgs portal. Notably, when the lightest unstable dark meson has a mass of approximately 3 GeV, it predominantly decays into a pair of gluons and behaves as a long-lived particle, a scenario that has received relatively little attention. We consider various Higgs production channels at the LHC and investigate two processes for generating dark mesons: (1) the cascade decay of the Higgs boson into a pair of light pseudoscalar mediators, which subsequently decay into four dark mesons; and (2) the dark shower and hadronization process whereby the Higgs boson decays into a pair of dark quarks that subsequently evolve into dark mesons. These processes give rise to novel gluon-rich dark jets composed of long-lived dark mesons. Notably, we find that appropriate trigger selection constitutes a crucial factor for detecting these signal signatures in both tracker system and CMS muon system. At the high-luminosity LHC, the exotic Higgs branching ratio to cascade decays (dark showers) can be constrained below $$ \mathcal{O}\left({10}^{-5}-{10}^{-1}\right) $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>O</mml:mi> <mml:mfenced> <mml:mrow> <mml:msup> <mml:mn>10</mml:mn> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>−</mml:mo> <mml:mn>5</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> <mml:mo>−</mml:mo> <mml:msup> <mml:mn>10</mml:mn> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>−</mml:mo> <mml:mn>1</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> </mml:mfenced> </mml:math> $$ \left[\mathcal{O}\left({10}^{-5}-{10}^{-2}\right)\right] $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mfenced> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>O</mml:mi> <mml:mfenced> <mml:mrow> <mml:msup> <mml:mn>10</mml:mn> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>−</mml:mo> <mml:mn>5</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> <mml:mo>−</mml:mo> <mml:msup> <mml:mn>10</mml:mn> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>−</mml:mo> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> </mml:mfenced> </mml:mrow> </mml:mfenced> </mml:math> for dark meson proper lifetimes cτ ranging from 1 mm to 100 m.