Search for long lived charged particles with the ATLAS detector / Bressler Shikma
The Standard Model (SM) is the current model of the fundamental particles and their interactions.
However, it has to be extended in order to include gravity, dark matter, unify all forces and be
extendable to higher energies.
Long lived charged particles are allowed by many models of physics beyond the SM. In general,
different models have different characteristics. However, long lived charged particles have a
common characteristic in many models; if produced at the Large Hadron Collider some of them
would travel with velocity significantly lower than the speed of light. Although the momentum (and
therefore β) spectrum of those particles is model dependent, the common signal is a heavy longlived
charged particle with velocity smaller than the speed of light, β<1. This unique signature
makes the search for it model independent.
Our goal is to find a long lived charged particle, if it exists. Such a discovery would provide the
first experimental evidence for physics beyond the SM. In absence of discovery, the interpretation
of our results would be an exclusion of many theoretical extension of the SM.