The CMS team have been searching for exotic long-lived particles. Adding a new algorithm to their system for their latest run has increased the results gained from less data.

Take a look at the update in detail:

Findings from Run 3 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has suggested the possibility of ‘dark photon’ production in the decay of Higgs bosons in the detector.

Dark photons are exotic, long-lived particles. They have an average lifetime of more than a tenth of a billionth of a second, which makes them ‘long-lived’ compared to other particles produce in the LHC. They are ‘exotic’ because they are not part of the Standard Model.

With there being tens of millions of collisions every second taking place in the LHC, only a few thousand can be stored and analysed. During the latest Run, a trigger system has been fine-tuned to look for specific phenomena which could help reveal the dark photon. This improvement to the trigger has meant that the team has gathered a strong result using just a third of the amount of data as previous searches.

“This work shows how being clever and coming up with new ways of doing things can give better results than just doing more of the same old thing.“

– Joel Goldstein, CMS team

This new result narrows in on the limits on the parameters of the decay off Higgs bosons to dark photons. Physicists are clearer on the areas where they can search for them.

Read the news report by CMS: https://home.cern/news/news/physics/cms-collaboration-cern-presents-its-latest-search-new-exotic-particles