Paper detail

Searches for long-lived and highly-ionizing particles at the CMS and ATLAS experiments

Long-lived particles are contained in a variety of beyond Standard Model theories, including supersymmetric models, universal extra dimensions, or technicolor theories. If the lifetime of such a particle is long enough, the particle can enter - or even pass through - the detector before it decays. Therefore, searches for long-lived particles require a very different search strategy compared to conventional searches for particles beyond the Standard Model. If the new particle is not only weakly interacting, the particle can be reconstructed itself and not only via its decay products. A very specific characteristic of such new heavy charged particles is their large ionization losses when traveling through the detector. This article summarizes searches for long-lived particles at the CMS and ATLAS experiments that exploit the potentially high ionization losses per path length (dE/dx) of the new particle. The presented searches are performed on 8 and/or 13 TeV data. Additionally, an overview of the methodology of dE/dx measurements at the CMS and ATLAS experiments is given.