Abstract
Light neutralinos could be copiously produced from the decays of mesons generated in cosmic-ray air showers. These neutralinos can be long-lived particles in the context of R-parity violating (RPV) supersymmetric models, implying that they could be capable of reaching the surface of the earth and decay within the instrumental volume of large neutrino detectors. In this letter, we use atmospheric neutrino data from the Super-Kamiokande experiment to derive novel constraints for the RPV couplings involved in the production of long-lived light neutralinos from the decays of charged $D$-mesons and kaons. Our results highlight the potential of neutrino detectors to search for long-lived particles, by demonstrating that it is possible to explore regions of parameter space that are not yet constrained by any fixed-target nor collider experiments.
Highlights
The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 [1,2] provides conclusive evidence of the Standard Model (SM), and consolidates the hierarchy problem as one of the main theoretical puzzles in modern physics [3]
The signal computed in Eq (15) depends on the neutralino mass and R-parity violating (RPV) couplings through its lifetime, branching fraction of production from mesons, and the fraction of neutralinos that decay to an e-like signal in the detector
The lifetime frontier has emerged as a powerful line of exploration to search for beyond the Standard Model physics, specially in the absence of new signals at the LHC
Summary
The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 [1,2] provides conclusive evidence of the Standard Model (SM), and consolidates the hierarchy problem as one of the main theoretical puzzles in modern physics [3]. Prospects for light, long-lived neutralinos have been performed from the decays of D and B mesons in references [30,32,35,36,37], from Z boson decays in [29,31,34,38], and from the decay of τ leptons in BelleII [33] Most of these searches are based on experiments that are either in construction like FASER [39], or even in earlier stages as they are subject to funding/approval (e.g., SHiP [40], MATHUSLA [41], and others [42,43]). We consider the possibility of searching for neutralinos produced in the decays of D-mesons and kaons that are generated in the sky, when highly energetic cosmic rays collide with the upper layers of the atmosphere The former process allows us to compare our results with the previously mentioned studies in the literature, references [30,32], where the sensitivity reach at collider experiments was estimated for selected benchmarks.
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