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

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 $\mathcal{O}(10^{-5}-10^{-1})$ [$\mathcal{O}(10^{-5}-10^{-2})$] for dark meson proper lifetimes $cτ$ ranging from $1$ mm to $100$ m.