6–10 Jul 2026
University of the Western Cape
Africa/Johannesburg timezone
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Search for emerging jets with the ATLAS experiment

7 Jul 2026, 15:00
20m
Lecture Hall GH3 (University of the Western Cape)

Lecture Hall GH3

University of the Western Cape

Oral Presentation Track B - Nuclear, Particle and Radiation Physics Nuclear, Particle and Radiation Physics -2

Speaker

Arnab Laha (University of the Witwatersrand)

Description

The Standard Model (SM) encapsulates our best understanding of fundamental particles and their interactions. While it is remarkably successful in describing experimental data, it fails to account for several fundamental observations, including the nature of dark matter. This has motivated extensive exploration of physics beyond the SM, particularly models involving a hidden or Dark Sector (DS) that is weakly coupled to visible matter. Dark Sector searches are now an integral part of the ATLAS Collaboration physics program, alongside traditional Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) searches.

Dark sector models with rich phenomenology offer a variety of non-conventional detector signatures in the search for new physics beyond the SM. Among these, emerging jets provide a striking and novel experimental signature. In such models, heavy mediators couple Standard Model quarks to dark quarks, which subsequently undergo confinement in a dark QCD-like sector. The resulting dark hadrons are long-lived and decay back to Standard Model particles with displaced vertices, producing jets that “emerge” gradually within the detector volume, characterized by multiple displaced vertices and may have a significant fraction of non-detectable particles within the jet.

I will present an effort to search for emerging jets using the ATLAS detector with the latest data collected between 2022 and 2025 at a center-of-mass energy of 13.6 TeV in proton-proton collisions, incorporating several improved analysis strategies. I will demonstrate how centrally developed advanced tracking and displaced vertex reconstruction algorithms enhance sensitivity for such an unconventional signature. I will also discuss ongoing efforts toward ensuring the longevity and reinterpretability of these results through publicly available analysis information.

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Author

Arnab Laha (University of the Witwatersrand)

Presentation materials