Quirks are a generic prediction of strongly-interacting hidden sectors with low Lambda. Such particles can be produced in large numbers at the LHC with high initial pT, but since they are tied together by a color string, the quirk--anti-quirk system has vanishing total pT and so propagates down the beam pipe into forward detectors. We show that quirks produce a spectacular signature of two...
We study the relevance of Initial- and Final-State radiation in QCD processes at the LHC as a production mechanism for dark photons. We implement dark photon splitting functions to quarks into the Monte-Carlo Generator Herwig and add it to the forward and backward evolution of the parton shower in LHC events. We simulate the most relevant forward physics processes, and identify in which way...
Proton beams at high luminosity colliders and fixed-target facilities offer remarkable sensitivity to new light weakly coupled degrees of freedom in the dark sector. In a recent study, we revisited the production of dark photons and dark scalars via proton bremsstrahlung for a range of beam energies, including those relevant to the proposed Forward Physics Facility (FPF) at the High Luminosity...
The idea that new physics could take the form of feebly interacting particles (FIPs) — particles with a mass below the electroweak scale, but which may have evaded detection due to their tiny couplings or very long lifetime — has recently gained a lot of traction. A wide variety of experiments have been proposed to search for this type of particles. However, the assumptions made about the...
We demonstrate that the searches for dark sector particles can provide probes of reheating scenarios, focusing on the Cosmic Millicharge Background (CmB) produced in the early universe. We discuss two scenarios of millicharge particles (mCPs), with or without kinetic mixing, as they have different theoretical motivations and cosmological signatures. The mCP without an accompanying dark photon...
